i went to granada and cordoba with esther and it was pretty good. the most notable thing for me was not the mezquita or the alhumbra (very impressive things though) but the racist german italian who worked in the cordoba hostel. he advised us; if he were to travel to australia, he would ‘share petrol with the natives’, told us that he had heard that there were ‘gang fights between the glue sniffers and the africans’, that his village was the only one in germany that had ‘unemployment and 50% muslims’ and told esther that she would be his perfect fighting partner because she was small and had less chance of being able to compete with him toe to toe. the following are some possible futures for him.

1. he will be on his knees begging for her back. he will say ‘my whole life has been a mistake except for the moments i am with you. from my opinions to my stupid ponytail to the way that my vertebrae dont fit together correctly anymore since i fell off my bike. i really only believe that there are 2 types of people in the world; us and everyone else. everyone else is just grey mush compared to the incandescent light that is our love. im sorry. im sorry.’ he will stand up and try to pull her body into his and she will resist and he will continue, still wrapping her body in his (annoyingly well defined and muscular, but still racist) arms; ‘i know i stuffed up but i will be there for you every single day from here. even if you get diseases that make you fat and yellow and grumpy the whole time. even after your own friends wont want to see you after the person you could become; ill be there. when you snore every night because of the fat in your neck and throat. even if you only ate curried brie and onions for the rest of your life; ill still want to kiss you. if you nails fall off the end of your fingers and start growing out of your palms; ill still want hand jobs from you. if every time i touched your feet a blister popped in my face; ill still massage your feet. i need you. im so sorry’. she will lean into him and get within 1 millimetre of kissing him and she will say ‘you shouldnt have fucked my sister on our wedding night’ and she will grab the boner that was forming in his pants and pierce it with the fork that was sitting on the table.

2. he will get out of bed and stub his toe causing incredible pain. yelling the word fuck over and over he will fall dick first into the ground. penis still erect with 3/4 of a morning glory. he will scream agonisingly as his penis gives way and breaks; disconnecting from his body. he will wake up and regret it all. all the comments. all the looks. all the different aspects of his personality that means he resembles less of a person and more of a fiendish monster capable only of hate anger and pain. all the anguish he seems to cause originated from his dick and now that it has been disconnected from his body, good has triumphed over evil and love has triumphed over hate.

3. drinking alone at the bar, wondering why nobody ever cares for him as much as he thinks he deserves, he will get drunk enough to ask the bar lady if she would like to share his bed with him because he is tired and drunk but still awake enough to have sexual intercourse with her if she so desires. unknown to him her jealous ex boyfriend is also sitting at the bar. she sees his cheating eyes stare at her every time she pours a drink and she wants to make him feel just a little bit of the pain and anguish of knowing the person you love is with someone else that he caused her to feel. she says ‘sure, ill have sexual intercourse with you this evening’ loud enough for everyone in the bar to hear. the half german half italian cant believe his luck and goes straight to the toilets to buy some condoms from the condom vending machine. he goes into the urinal and starts to piss, not sensing the danger of the jealous boyfriend with the empty pot glass in his hand. his has a semi forming as he pisses in anticipation of all the sexual intercourse he will be having later that night and he screams and screams and screams when the ex boyfriend brings down the pot glass onto his dick. he spends the next six months in hospital as doctors surgically remove glass from his dick that he has been told will only have a 20% chance of ever being erect again.

1. self analysis on attempts at forming emotional connections with other people in barcelona

attempt 1 - polish girl on pub crawl who never told me her name

8/10 for first sentence bringing up that my grandparents fled poland pre ww2 due to the whole jew thing.
6/10 for being the only one at bar pointing out that a lot of skilled labour is leaving poland to western europe to find jobs and that western europe is outsourcing and dumping all these unskilled jobs into poland due to the low wages, and isnt that sort of fucked up right?
0/10 for effectiveness at achieving aim of her wanting to be in conversation with me.

attempt 2 - canadian boy on pub crawl who should rename himself bland mcblandbland

10/10 for not telling him that he should pray to whatever version of christianity the cross tattoo he had on his neck that he never became intelligent enough to realise that he was an idiot who didnt deserve to be happy but probably was happy.

attempt 3 - american boy who viewed talking to me as a waste of time because he was convinced that he was ‘in’ with all the girls there

0/10 for falling for the trick where he buys 5 shots and then walks away and makes some shmuck pay for them.

2. self analysis of performance at different board and card games while in manchester

game 1 - articulate: a runaway success. helped by being in a team with a 13 year old girl who shared my same drive and determination to win at all costs. we double checked all other teams cards after their rounds to ensure that they did get the correct answer and almost stopped the game when insisting that ‘knees’ was not an acceptable answer for ‘knee’ as you need to get the singular and not the plural. though my nan did not appreciate being told ‘well if you want to count it and be a cheat, then go ahead and count it’ im sure my nan did appreciate my will to win (i did not have the courage to mention that she raised my dad; a serial cheater of women, so it should be no suprise that cheating runs in the family). there were a couple arguments with my partner, such as when i did not know who the first person on everest was (edmund hillary) and she told me that i should be thankful for england because if it wasnt for england id be ‘speaking aborigine’. fortunately the other teams were just as abusive towards eachother. watching my cousin tell her dad that he was an idiot for his description of ‘barrel’ (he said ‘its big and you drink beer from it’) and having him apologise to her for his performance made me realise that there are much stronger things than love. in the end i and my partner libby were victorious - 9/10.

game 2 - perudo: a failure that made me upset angry and ashamed - 1/10.

game 3 - whist: i have an uncle who had to have a large portion of his face and neck removed from his body due to cancer and i think that he would have felt something similiar to the experience of not knowing whether he would ever see his kids again if he died and whether, if he lived (it was 50/50), his wife would even find him attractive. maybe he would have changed emotionally as well as physically? by the look in his eyes i think that he felt that he was falling into a similiar hole emotionally as i beat him, his wife, his son and his father in law at whist - 10/10

3. some ideas

idea 1 - boy is making out with a one armed girl on his bed and he doesnt know how to tell her that he just wants to use her for her vagina then discard her. he wants to tell her that he doesnt care about her arm and he just wants her to know that he doesnt care without making her aware that he cares enough about not caring to even notice her stump. he struggles with this and accidentally says ‘jesus fuck tits’ when she rubs her stump against his cheek and he struggles to make an adequate recovery.

idea 2 - boy goes into work every day and starts viewing people only as numbers and sales results. all personality and feelings are reduced to their simplest form; how they can be harnessed into creating shareholder value. he proposes to his girlfriend saying that he needs her like a country needs taxes, like a project needs to have the net present value of future income flows that are higher than inflation, risk and borrowing costs, like a business needs employees that are able to think outside the square while maintaining corporate values and strategies. he goes into work one day aged 38 but looking anywhere from 45 to 58 and he gets called into an office where he speaks to this guy who shows him a bunch of graphs that prove beyond any hyperbolic doubt that it would be better for the company if he was replaced by a younger more effective version. after staring at the graphs for a few minutes he has no choice but to agree - it is as this point that he recognises the younger man as a perfect copy of himself. he tells him that it was all worth it and walks out to kill himself after saying goodbye to his wife and kids.

idea 3 - peach leaves mario for bowser and mario tells her that she has made a big mistake. he tells her that bowser is a drunk and he wont be there to rescue her if he beats her. peach tells mario that love isnt about passion and rescue and that the big things dont matter if the little things dont work. if she cant lie there in bed and just count how many ribs he has, what is the point of big quests? she fills more complete resting inside bowsers shell and wriggling her body up against his soft underside than she ever felt with mario on top of her grunting away while the sweat from his moustache fell into her mouth. mario doesnt understand because he has done everything right for her but the look in her eyes makes him understand that he will always just be looking for the next castle to rescue her from almost certain death. mario realises that he is incapable of real love and is just addicted to the thrill of proving to someone else that he is needed. mario grows old and dies from starvation after falling into a hole and breaking his hip.

my own fiscal responsibility is challenged when i am faced with free breakfast in my hostel only if i put up with awkward breakfast conversation. every morning in venice it is the same ‘what is you name, where are you from, do you have kangaroos and koalas there, i want to visit where is the best place in australia i should go?’ bullshit that makes me question whether complimentary buttered toast and orange juice is worth it. the orange juice is pulp free so yes, its worth it and i get coffee too. every morning is pretty bad but the worst was when this californian girl i was speaking to told me that america wasnt racist because they elected an ‘african american president’. i told her the correct term was person of colour and that australia had a half asian, half indian hermaphradite with no legs as prime minister so we could make a bigger list of things that we no longer were because of who we elected. it was the most painful and drawn out conversation that was meant to be a joke but turned out to be a serious discussion where i wanted to choke on my own toast that i had ever had in a venice hostel.

below are a list of things i believe are less painful than the conversations i had to have every morning just to get my free breakfast;

1. the ultimate betrayal from your wife and best friend

you come home early from work and your best friends car in the driveway is actually too much of a cliche that you dont consider he is on your bed having sex with your wife. you open the door and jokingly say ‘i cant wait to tell sally (your best friends wife) all about this’ and you hear them at ‘it’. the blood rushes from everywhere in your body and you dont even know where it goes. maybe it all gets sucked up into the cavity forming in your heart because you feel sick and you chest is caving in and you cant breathe but you walk up the stairs and you burst open the door and there they are. your heartbreak only made worse by the complete and utter cliche your life has now become - coming home from work early to find your best friend fucking your wife while burt bacharach plays over the bedside speakers you just had installed so that your dvd watching in bed could be surround sound. they see you and you go to remonstrate but you trip over the bra your wife never wears to bed with you anymore (now you know why) and twist your ankle so bad you hear it break. you scream and you cant move and you are yelling in pain both physical and emotional. white forms at the edges of your vision it hurts so much and you force yourself to stay awake because you have realised that your wife and best friend arent actually stopping. they are continuing until they are finished and then they will call an ambulance. the betrayal is complete and the cliche is at least (slightly) broken because at least in the cliche the wife and best friends shame and embarrassment at having completely and utterly let you down overwhelms the feeling of his penis inside of her. but they continue having sex until they have both climaxed while you lie on the ground with a broken ankle unable to breathe or think because of the pain. and you can never listen to burt bacharach again.

2. realising you have caused your 7 year old daughter to feel unhappy

she was 7 and 8 months and had been given a dog on her 7th birthday. most 7 year olds given a dog for their 7th birthday will end up loving that dog a reasonable amount. but 7 year olds whose parents have recently divorced end up loving their dog more than a reasonable amount. she doesnt care that her dad bought her the dog so that she would want to spend time at his house more, she only sees those eyes stare back at her and she is overwhelmed with emotions that no 7 year old can ever properly manage. she doesnt even notice her mums sarcasm when referring to the dolls house that her mum bought her to steal her love and when the mum sees how much she loves that dog she knows that she cant just buy another one because a 7 year olds heart isnt built like that. the dad wants to instil responsibility into the girl and gives her chores. washing dishes. mowing the lawn. keeping room tidy. etc. one afternoon she wants to get a headstart on the chores so she starts to mow the lawn. she had seen her dad do it a trillion times and so she starts the motor of the mower. she goes up the lawn twice and down once when she hears her dad come home. she was expecting him to be proud of her for getting a head start but he knows how dangerous those blades are and tells her off for using the mower without him - something he expressly told her she wasnt to do.

she starts to run off and sulk and her dog runs from the porch to comfort her. the dog had been domesticated and desensitised to any machinery and runs straight into the still running mower. its front paw disintegrates almost immediately into the blades and it gives off a yelp that means the daughter turns around and runs for the dog. the dad sprints down and starts to swear as he takes his phone out of his jacket. not sure whether to call an ambulance for a dog and trying to think about whether a dog ambulance is a real thing or something he just thinks should be a real thing and he says the word fuck over and over. he calls 000 and speaks to the operator. the dog has to be put down and when the 7 and 8 months old daughter looks at her dad she doesnt have any emotions left to even feel badly towards him. she is empty and he carries her home from the vet. the next day she walks outside and goes to the mower. still in the same position, but motor no longer running she pulls the cord of the mower to get it started. the blades, with dry blood still on them, start to turn and within a second are at full speed. the father, who had only gone to the toilet for one moment after sitting by her bedside the whole night, had heard the mower start and sprinted down the stairs. he makes it to the front porch to witness his daughter stick her hand into the blades and the blood from her hands speckle all over her freckled face. he screams an almost identical sound as to the sound the dog made the day before and he runs over to his silent daughter. he calls the ambulance but he can see that there is no hand left. his unhappiness in that moment is about as great as anything he has ever felt before and while the daughter will get over this, he never will. (also when the mum finds out, she feels a lot of guilt that mixed up in her emotions is the thought that ‘the doll house isnt looking so bad now’)

3. realising you fucked your whole life up

there is no such thing as a job that isnt repetitive and stupid. the whole point is that its a series of repeatable tasks that need doing and your only hope was that the series of repeatable tasks which needed your doing wouldnt be that bad. but getting a job at an orphanage for the terminally ill was definitely not the best use of you liberal arts degree with a major in linguistic anthropology and a minor in sumerian architecture. every day you try to convince prospective parents to adopt a kid who has a 20% chance of survival. ‘take a gamble on love’ isnt really that romantic a notion when you are talking about falling in love with a child who will probably conk out and die on you unless they find a cure for leukemia quick smart. but every day you try to literally give these kids away and pretend that they arent broken or dying or that it doesnt even matter if they are. ‘a kid isnt just for christmas, but these ones are’ as a slogan for your orphanage caused complaints to rise, but adoptions to stay relatively flat at zero. your job doesnt even get you any ‘hot puss’, unless you count the overweight toothless grandmother prostitutes who you pass on your way home from work every day and visit once a fortnight just to feel even more debased than you feel while you are at work. you go into the office every day sick with dread knowing that the repetitive underpaid fuck up of a job that you fell into also makes you incredibly sad and depressed as you watch the kids who you try to give away slowly die in front of your eyes.

besides the free breakfast that i have to pay for with painful conversations, venice has been pretty good. saw lots of churches and even got to use my great jesus joke (why is jesus so good in the sack? because hes hung like this (stretch out arms as if being crucified)). next stop is manchester to visit the family.

there were two types of people in the ski town that i went to - punters & seasonairs

punters

punters are those who pay and come to ski. like going to the ritz, both the rich and the poor are welcome to become punters but the huge costs of skiing with your family tends to keep out a lot of people (while the biggest cost is accommodation, everything adds up from ski hire, boot hire, helmet, gloves, food, ski lessons, daily ski passes, insurance, food, drink etc.). they basically fulfill every stereotype that you would have of families that go on a ski vacation to the french alps every year - in the town i was in, they were overwhelmingly english (despite being in france, i did not have to speak a single word of french while in the ski town) - overly worried about their spoilt kids, very light when tipping underpaid seasonairs, constantly hassling ski instructors waiters barmaids & any service staff to ensure that they are getting full value for money, and all have been skiing since they were kids.

most punters bring their kids along and any over the age of 15 could easily be picked out by the speed at which they prefer to spend time in ‘clubs’ getting drunk on their parents booze (booze was probably the second most common activity behind skiing) and being seduced by italian/french/other ski instructors who viewed ski instructing as an introduction to having sex with teenagers while they (the ski instructors) were still under the age of 50. every single conversation i had with a punter revolved around how good their kids were at skiing and i was pretty sure that every single one of them was in a loveless pit of a marriage which neither the husband or the wife had the strength to leave.

seasonairs

seasonairs were probably more interesting than punters in that they were sadder and more depressed. these are people who perform a job at the ski town for the season, get paid very little (depending on whether accommodation was included in the job they received a wage of 3 - 7 euro an hour) and get the opportunity to have a working holiday. they wait tables, serve drinks, sell ski gear, cook and clean for families (there are these things called chalets which you can stay in wit your family for a week or two and have a live in chef and cleaner) and basically keep the whole place running. they are either late teens or young twenties travelling and working, young thirties trying to find themselves or older retired couples looking for a cheap holiday. they are all incredibly bored once they get past the first week - you work for a bit, you ski and then there is nothing to do but drink. the community is mostly insular and everyone has ‘shagged’ everyone. on my first night i was introduced to people as ‘the town slag’ & ‘the town hunk’.

the late teens and early twenties are ok - they just get drunk and fuck eachother the whole time. while most of them are incredibly thick and had a glazed look over their eyes caused by alcohol abuse they are pretty well natured. i had lots of conversations with them but i cant remember a single one. i am guessing that when they all say goodbye to eachother they will promise to keep in touch and talk about the lifelong friends they have all made. they will then go back to drinking with their mates from home who are exactly the same personality wise than the ones they met in the ski town. they will then live out their stupid bland lives and try not to drink and smoke while pregnant and hope that being boring isnt genetic.

the ones who really got me were the older ones trying to find themselves. i dont know whether they were people who had been doing it for ten years, people who were looking for a new start or people just drifting but they shared one thing in common - they all felt they were too old to be there. there was this one woman who was incredibly lovely - 32, broke & still referring to her ex husband as her husband. i was at the bar ordering a round of drinks and she came up to me and said ‘i really have to start making something of my life’. i looked at her and all i could see was the dull look of someone who was too drunk. mouth slightly ajar, face cocked and eyes having difficulty focusing on me. she then said to the bar woman ‘three tequilas please’ and i said ‘jesus’. i wanted to say that i didnt think making something of her life started with tequila shots in a club called ‘dick teas’ (not even a joke, that was the bar name and it was full of 16 year old punters getting absolutely smashed listening to music that made me want to question whether a nuclear holocaust was really a bad idea or not. some had their parents there and the parents were split between trying to desperately put a condom onto the guy who was going to end up having sex with their daughter that night and trying to see if they could pull one of their daughters friends for a quick ‘shag’). i didnt think that drinking another tequila shot surrounded by dumb kids half her age was the way to start making something of her life and that maybe she should use something that wasnt alcohol to feel a real emotion. but all i could do was stare at her fumble her way through her pockets looking for her bank card. needless to say she got very drunk and the family she was supposed to serve breakfast to the next day were not 100% happy with her waking up at 2pm.

the thing that did make it all worthwhile was the skiing. i cant really describe how fantastic it was - the views across the french alps are some of the most beautiful things i have ever seen. i dont know how to post a picture and text in the same post on my stupid computer so i will post a picture i took while skiing separately.

1. basically the depth of everything that is wrong in the world

the amount of americans in paris is basically overwhelming. the major issue with them is their piercing accents which make them noticeable at almost any decibel. but to me the most confronting thing i saw was an amercian couple in their 50s ask a homeless person to take a photo of them. they didnt want to give the woman something for nothing so they asked her to take the photo of them standing in front of some shop/beautiful architecture stuff. while there may seem to have been some risk with the homeless woman running off and taking the camera one look at this woman would make you realise that this wasnt an issue. she was is such poor shape that the higher risk would have been falling over dead while taking the photo. and after she took the photo the american couple asked to take a picture of her. they wanted the whole of paris you see - warts and all. so the homeless woman sat down and looked incredibly depressing. then (this is no fucking joke) the american couple started moving her body around. they wanted her to look in a certain way for their photos and started physically moving this homeless woman around so that she would seem more homeless.

they moved her head so that they would have a better view of her. the wife actually physically moved the homeless womans body so that her wrinkled worn face would be more visible to the camera. my major regret of this moment is that i wasnt able to take a picture of the couple taking a picture of the homeless woman. they obviously wanted to recreate an idea of poverty and have some evidence that they witnessed it but for them it wasnt enough to witness actual poverty and desperation. they needed to form the actual poverty and desperation to fit their own ideal of how it should look like. they wanted to see the wrinkled face in all its glory and not have it hidden by looking down. they wanted this homeless woman to basically disregard every part of her that maintained dignity nd self respect because they were offering a couple euro to her and she should do what she was told right?

she did do what was told and moved her face up so that she gave the most ‘realistic’ view of what constitutes poverty and desperation. her acting in the way she did probably does constitutes everything that is wrong, people do what they need to do for a few euro and that is that. the american couple get not only their rabbit hole into poverty but a photo to evidence it and the homeless woman gets enough money for some food. but it just seems so dishonest and stupid and cruel.

2. a description of the only beret i saw in paris

the only beret i saw in paris was worn by a 16 year old amercian boy buying a bottle of wine from a supermarket with his parents. he talked about the prospective wines using phrases like ‘bouquet’ and ‘aroma’. i looked at his parents faces hoping to see what regret they had over not using a condom that one time. a child is the ultimate present to give to the world - 50% you and 50% your partner who (in this case) you are still with. and to see that your child is basically an annoying cumstain on the world that wont wash off your clothes must be an incredibly confronting and sad experience. they must have either realised long ago what their child was, or they hadnt realised yet because there was no spiritual awakening on their face.

when they eventually chose the sub 5 euro bottle of piss masquerading as a ‘full bodied aroma of fruit’ (i was buying a bottle of wine at the same time, so i followed them, drawn into watching them, and getting off on how repulsive i found every single word they were saying) the 16 year old with the beret insisted on buying the bottle of wine from the supermarket in french (you had to buy the wine from a separate counter). i assumed the conversation would be something like ‘can i please buy this wine’ then an exchange of currency as per how transactions occur traditionally in supermarkets. i was mistaken.

my french is poor but i at least know what the sentence ‘my name is’ sounds like and that is how this shit for brains dick started speaking to the cashier when buying the wine. he pointed out his father, explaining he had his fathers permission to buy the wine and spoke for about 30 seconds in what i can only imagine was a description about how he wanted to buy a bottle of wine. you just have to picture this cashier standing there, only wanting to scan the bottle and say the price and this fuck is talking to him about how he would like to purchase the bottle of wine. as if there was confusion over why they were there and what everybodys role was. the most insulting part of the whole affair was that the cashier spoke english - this beret fuck just wanted to practise his french and be able to say that he didnt need to speak in english once the whole time he as in paris. the complete lack of awareness that maybe not everyone in paris is there so that your experience is the best it can be and that maybe some underpaid cashier has to smile and pretend its endearing is dehumanising and depressing.

i can only take comfort in the fact that, even though i drank my bottle of wine alone, i will never be as lonely or pathetic as a 16 year old beret wearing american fuck. i hope for his sake he earns a lot of money because there is no chance that any other human being whose love is worth anything could ever be capable of loving him.

3. watching some turks take pictures of themselves in front of the eiffel tower.

my first day into the city i met some turks who were going to the eiffel tower and they invited me to come. i probably should have reassessed when they took 30 minutes to put their make up on (and did not laugh at my ‘girls only wear make up and perfume because theyre ugly and they stink’ joke that my little brother assured me would be a crowd pleaser) the only people who land in a city they have never been to before and are only staying for 1 night (as the turks were) and value putting on makeup above seeing the city are probably people who are going to be unhappy when their 15 year old daughter gets pregnant, their husband leaves them for their aupair and they have to face up to the reality of being a 39 year old grandmother who can no longer afford the collagen injections for the ever enlarging crows feet forming out the sides of her eyes.

we did eventually head for the eiffel tower & i was suitably impressed by how great it looked. i feel like more of a human being having expereinced this, but the really enlightening experience was witnessing the turks spend around an hour taking photos of themselves with caked on make up in front of the eiffel tower. while not necessarily a positive experience, a part of me was impressed by the turks complete disregard for enjoying something without taking photos of themselves looking good while enjoying it. their smiles for the photos werent their real smiles - obviously some face they have practised in the mirror that they think makes themselves look as attractive as possible. the way their heads would angle slightly away from the camera - my guess is the real reason they have to practise this is because they will most likely have to fake all emotion with their children who they secretly hate for being younger than them and their husbands who they need to please to satisfy some daddy issues they never really got over.

faking emotion from a young age probably seeps into every other part of their stupid lives and i feel i got as much joy out of the sick feelings of superiority and glee over how much better a human being i was than them than i did from the eiffel tower. though in the end the joke will probably be on me as they will still probably end up happier than me.

4. being taken to an australian bar on my night out on the town

i met a girl who showed me a bit of paris and then said we would go out on the town and get drunk. while the existence of a turkish boyfriend definitely decreased the likelihood of us falling in love i believe that the number one reason why we wouldnt end up getting married was definitely her deciding, that out of all the places in paris to go out to at night, an australian themed bar was the place to go.

every cliche of an australian bar in paris was there, from a picture of the new zealand rugby team doing the haka, ‘aborignal’ painting all over the wall with boomerangs everywhere, tooheys extra dry on sale for 5e50 a bottle, shit american hip hop was being played by the dj and while i did not look in the back i believe that there was some sand, water and 4 men with southern cross tattoos beating up a lebanese man while the crowd did aussie aussie aussie chants. after being away from australia for a total of 5 days i did not miss music that was so loud you couldnt hear yourself, girls who look at my dancing and laugh, overpriced beers and the feeling that when you look at every single other person in the club that you are really looking at people drinking away the feeling deep inside of themselves that they dont know what they are doing with their lives, can somebody please tell them already?

i got drunk on tooheys and filled myself with about as much self hatred and anger as possible which i let out in aggressive dancing at the french girls i was with who said goodbye to me without as much warmth as they said hello earlier in the evening.

5. americans turned me into less of a human being

the worst part about americans in paris was the way every single time they would open their mouth to talk was how their stupid voices would come out. nasally and self assured, their voices were in direct contrast to the soft french that is mostly heard. there is something about hearing an american voice which basically takes you away from experiencing something and makes you think about how you are experiencing it. the easiest way for any moment to be ruined is to be staring at something and be deep in thought only to be awakened by the voices of some couple behind you saying ‘oh would you look at that hun’, ‘beautiful hun’.

any major tourist attraction in paris (and there are a lot) are overwhelmed by a few things:

american tourists
african refugees selling identical mass producable chinese made miniature eiffel tower figurines. every single attraction in paris has masses of african refugees all selling the same crap. at the louvre, at notre dame, scared heart cathedral etc the exact same figurines are sold. (the irony is almost over the top to even matter that when you buy this ‘memory’ of paris as a memento of the city, you are actually buying something that you could buy anywhere in the world. it ends up being apt that the figurine is a miniature representation of a tourist city having as many portions of itself commodicised and sold off as possible - ‘come buy a piece of paris, made in china’ explains a lot of the shit being sold in paris.)
sheer magnificence and beauty of the city that mostly makes it all worthwhile - whether it be the art, architecture or just the history of a city that has gone through so many political upheavals.

but there were times when hearing an american voice would make me want to punch their stupid faces until their teeth were stuck in my knuckles. like the girl in line at the louvre who kept complaining to her mother and step father (him being the step father was obvious by the tone of her voice and her repeated mentions to him that he wasnt her father (i was impressed with his ability to not say to her ‘im just here to fuck your mother i dont give a single shit what type of father figure you view me as’).) about how they have to follow their plan for the day which included what time they would get to the louvre, what exhibitions they would look at, when they would have lunch etc. when she mentioned that the worst thing that can happen on a holiday is getting lost i resisted the urge to list 5 things that i think could happen to her worse than that on this holiday. she caused me to think poorly of other human beings and if someone had come along, pointed a gun at her head and asked if i was willing to take the bullet instead i would have looked her in the eyes and told her to hope that reincarnation isnt true because she isnt coming back as anything good.

americans made me less of a human being.

in the end paris was pretty great - i feel it would be a much better city to live in than visit.

1. i meet a portugese girl who is down on her luck. recessions arent easy when you never finished highschool and your number one talent is the ability to speak portugese at a speed that means even those fluent in portugese struggle to understand you. she will be short and constantly angry. she will often aggressively accuse me of things for no (apparent) reason but each time she hurls portugese invective at me i will find myself entranced and unable to move. most boys who have been attracted to her have eventually been put off by her overwhelming anger at the world but not me. it isnt fair - unemployment amongst 18-25 year olds is around 25% and austerity measures arent giving her more of a chance. she will yell at me when i say i had 25% unemployment of the heart and that she just successfully applied for the job. the ones where she gets really angry at me she will finish off with a phrase that i eventually google - its ‘i should have listened to my mother’. we will get married after 3 and a half weeks of whirlwind romance where i annoy her so that she can abusively yell at me in portugese. she will travel back to melbourne with me and after 1 and a half weeks of getting bored of waiting for me to come home from work at 7pm will leave me for an irish backpacker who majored in portugese history in his liberal arts degree. when she tells me that she is leaving me for the irish backpacker she will speak gently and softly and i will finally understand what true love is. as she walks out i will snidely say that it is funny that an irish backpacker with a liberal arts degree in portugese history hasnt been able to find a job yet in melbourne.

2. i meet a woman who is obnoxiously more attractive than i am. when we walk down the street i joke to her that people must look at us and think ‘that is weird that young man is purchasing high class escorts because you would think that at his young age he could at least try to be with a person where there isnt a direct transaction for services rendered’ and that it wouldnt occur to people that she could be with me for me. i wont notice how she laughs a little nervously and pretends not to understand what i said. everything will go right. she will like playing squash at the exact level that is slightly below mine. she will be competitive on the courts so that i think i have worked hard but she will never beat me (or let me win). she will know the exact moments during the night where i want to be held and the exact moments where i would rather vomit than be touched by another human being. we will get married after 3 and a half weeks of whirlwind romance and she will come back to melbourne with me. we will have 3 kids and she will only get more beautiful as i get balder fatter and dumber. she will still kiss me with a passion that sometimes means that i taste blood and one day a man will turn up at the door and say that i owe him $17m. i will laugh and he will say that the girl i met at the bar 14 years earlier and became my wife is a high class escort who specialises in long term relationships (and/or love). the nagging feeling that i had in my gut every single second that we were together will make sense. he will say that for 14 years of happiness and 3 kids i owe him $17m. i tell him that we just found out she is pregnant and he will tell me it is now $19m. ill tell him i dont have the money and he will break my kneecaps and leave me to die of a broken heart.

3. i meet a girl and convince her that i was born in pakistan. she is unable to tell the difference between my pakistani accent and a legitimate pakistani accent. i become so commited to being pakistani for her that we will get married after 3 and a half weeks of whirlwind romance. over the course of our relationship, and my time method acting the pakistani accent, i convince myself i am pakistani. my mum and dad think that my accent is at best a terribly racist charicature of pakistani culture and at worst i have developed a split personality syndrome and that my wife is taking advantage of someone terribly ill. we will stay married for 37 years and i will never stop maintaining my pakistani accent to both the eventual loss of every single friendship i had pre march 2013 as well as my career. i will also find a happiness that i had always thought i would never be capable of experiencing. i will die from being brutally beaten when i go to a fancy dress party with my wife - she is dressed as day and i am dressed as night - and people incorrectly misinterpret my costume as blackface and my accent as mocking pakistani culture.

4. i will meet a half cypriot half greek girl and teach her that the most powerful emotion that exists isnt love or even hate or even a real emotion. its bearocuracy. or more accurately its the way people follow rules and systems without thinking about anything beyond the immediate action of following whatever rule they need to follow. people arent people and there is no room for anyone to make a decision or to even avoid any sense of obligation or responsibility for their actions. a hammer isnt responsible for hitting into a nail and a gear on a bike isnt responsible for turning if someone pedals. ill teach my new wife that we wont marry for love, we wont marry even to feel a sense of happiness but we will marry because of some sense of obligation to following a set of rules niether of us really understand. i will tell her to give up trying to understand the reasons why people do what they do and to give up on trying to figure out why seemingly intelligent groups of people work together to achieve absolutely nothing at great cost to other people, the environment and humans capacity for love. after 3 and a half weeks of whirlwind feeling obligated to spend time with eachother romance we will get married. i will tell her that we will stay togerher until the exact moment that i have to follow a different set of rules that mean we should no longer be married.

5. she will watch the tears streaming down my face as i am watching les miserables on the plane for the second time in 4 and a half hours. she will see my fist pumps during the scene where they sing about the colour of red and the colour of black. she will see what emotional depths i am capable of falling into as i cry when jean valjean carries whatshisface through the mud. she will re evaluate what is an acceptable amount of emotion to show on a plane. (please note while a lot of this story is a joke, the fact that i had to stop watching les miserables because i couldnt stop crying is not a joke) . our whirlwind romance will last approximately the exact flight duration fro melbourne to dubai and while we wont technically get married i challenge anybody to look me in the eyes and claim that i felt any less for this girl than i will probably care for my future wife.

i fly into paris leaving today so i think this will be a travel blog for the next month or so. if anybody knows anything to do in paris or any part of europe send me a message.

1. knowing that most people will never be able to achieve anything because google keeps such a good record of your search history

you will be running for a powerful position in the government and they will sit down and the interviewer will ask you if you have anything you would like to disclose. you will say no and the interviewer will bring up on the screen your google search history of 25 years ago when you were 16. ‘this is hardly relevant’ & ‘but there was a context’ will seem like reasonable excuses but even you will not want to vote for yourself when you read the statistical analysis showing that you spent 1 hour reading about hulk hogans sex tape on both wikipedia and gawker every day for two weeks. the next person wont do any better because it doesnt matter how much good you have done for the world – it doesnt matter if you spent 10 years wanking off trees – you will always have the fact you spent 4 years in the gym so you could go to steriosonic every year and take videos of yourself with your shirt off and a girl who looks maybe 17 if youve had a couple (but in the cold hard light of day when uploaded to facebook she looks like a girl who would be too young to hang out with your little sister) on your shoulders and you definitely wont be able to make people forget the facial expression you are making as one hand points upwards at the girls crotch and one hand makes a v shape in front of your mouth as your tongue licks the crevice between your fingers. there is no way to use context to explain  the video of you discussing with your mates about what the worse: the holocaust for the jews or ricky ponting retiring before you could crack the australian test team. too many people will have said and done too many things on too many mediums that will be stored and easily traced back to individuals for anybody to be clean anymore. the fact that nearly every single person will be blackmailable is definitely something that makes me feel good as one advantage i have is that i have a lower level at which i feel humiliated than others.

2. reading the weird google searches that people have typed to land on this blog

i have this thing that tells me the searches people have done on google to land on this blog and some of them are pretty good. each one of the following searches did not look at any page besides the landing page as unfortunately for them the blog was not what they were after;

venn diagram of the french and indian war

arab sweet dream boys penis tumblr

“legless woman” tumblr

male indian masturbating tumblr.com

jew penis tumblr

pakistani gay on tumblr.com/

belly ring cum infected somethin girlfriend “i didnt care”

photos pregnant masturbation tumblr.com

shitvag

titfucking n animal.tumblr.com (this one is definitely my favourite, are there titfucking animal tumblrs out there?)

www.penies of rickyponting.com

3. losing table tennis games against people who i would have gotten up on the tram to offer my seat to

i filled in on my little brothers and dads table tennis team and i expected to be soundly beaten. but when i turned up and saw that our opposition was a man who had suffered from a stroke and couldnt use 50% of his body correctly and his (at best) 55 year old wife i became very conflicted at whether i should be aiming for the guys backhand the whole time or whether i should go easy on him. after about 3 points of having to put up with his forehand i spent every single point against him trying desperately to manoeuvre the ball towards the half of his body he had lost control of but to no avail. he hit winner after winner against me and his wife did not go easy on me either. both my brother and i lost in straight sets and there were some facial expressions my brother made that got me. the way that he did a fist pump while trailing 8 2 in the second set and looked at me as if to say ‘im gonna do it’. the way his face couldnt decide whether anger, frustration or humiliation was the more apt emotion and he ended up having this weird combination of all 3. during the doubles he accused me of not taking the game seriously enough and said to me ‘this is my career joe’ and i laughed at him. in the end i wasnt even frustrated about losing because the thought that these two people were going to go home and literally ram into eachother while smiling about how they showed those two young smartarses what was what filled me with joy. if i saw a man who couldnt use half of his body sitting by himself on a tram i would feel a little bit anxious because i would assume that he was unhappy, alone and slowly waiting for death. i shouldnt make any assumptions and it says more about me than anybody else but it is basically all that i am overwhelmed with. but seeing the look on their faces after they won the doubles to me was one of the best things id ever seen in my life. i hope they went home and just drilled into eachother with more passion than their bodies should reasonably allow. i hope they went home and filled their one bedroom apartment with the sound of mud flapping into the wet ground as she yelled ‘fuck me like you fucked those kids at table tennis’. i hope they lied next to eachother afterwards and he ran his one good hand up her back and counted the notches of her spine and whispered into her ear that next week he was going to have to wrap a condom around his table tennis bat because next time he fucks someone on the table tennis tables he wants to be safe. i want her to giggle and turn around and tell him that he is the best thing that has ever happened to her.

4. the hangover 3 made it onto a serial killers manifesto

there is this former cop in the us who was fired from his job a few years ago. he is now going around killing everyone who he considers responsible for this. he put his manifesto online and a lot of it is pretty much what you would expect; ‘im going to clear my name’, ‘im going to make you all pay’, ‘blah blah’. there was one bit that nearly made me cry with laughter – it was when he started to give advise to todd phillips (creator of the hangover):

“It’s kind of sad I won’t be around to view and enjoy The Hangover III. What an awesome trilogy. Todd Phillips, don’t make anymore Hangovers after the third, takes away the originality of its foundation.”

this is one of his big regrets. the fact he wont be around to watch hangover 3. not only that but he is worried that the hangover 4 will ‘take away the originality of its foundation’. actually take the time to think about what he is saying, he is going on a rampage and he knows he will be killed while doing it. he wants to get out there some of the things he thinks are most important and on that list he puts the creative integrity of the hangover films – ‘please dont make a fourth’ he is saying. ‘please guys, you have such a great thing going on with the hangover and 3 is the perfect number. im already annoyed that im going to miss number 3 because of the whole murderous rampage thing and i would just be happier knowing that the trilogy will not be tarnished by an unnecessary 4th film’. jesus fuck is pretty much all ic an think as a response to that.

5.

its not a lack of intelligence that holds people back but the fact they will never be in a position to really understand the impact of their actions on the wider world. there are these huge systems where many people perform many varied and different tasks to achieve overall aims with little connection to the people who act as cogs within these massive systems.

like the business where the person who works as data entry so that another area can allocate sales opportunities to different travelling salespeople for a product designed by engineers who are going off a customer satisfaction survey designed and run by an area who does nothing but run surveys and has no idea about the exact needs of any particular survey – they just use the same generic questions every time for every product survey, staff satisfaction survey or when they probably go home to their wives or husbands and do a happiness survey.

everyone performs their task to the best of their abilities and has little room for any thought as to how the whole system works. nobody knows if there is a better way and nobody knows of any way to influence any other area because each individual are is so huge that any one person is both unable to understand the intricacies of any one particular area and the overall system and how they interact. things dont work as well as they should because everything is so large and any one person isnt smart enough to change it. people starve and die of preventable diseases. people stay in situations that make them unhappy. people grow old and look in the mirror and see a reflection that is 55 but they could have sworn they were just 35. the only way you will be able to be happy with what you have is if you simplify everything by introducing something like ‘religion’ or ‘family’ where nothing matters except for those small things you can wrap your head around because if you try to wrap your head around why the world is so much darker and bleaker than it should be you will not be happy.

every time you buy clothes you are ensuring that someone somewhere was paid shit to make them. every time you eat at a restaurant you are paying for someone to risk burns and cuts for less money per hour than the cheapest entrée. the reason people dont make a difference positively to the world is not that people themselves are unintelligent, it is that the world formed into huge interconnected systems that makes any group of people trying to achieve something together unintelligent.

if you dont feel meaningless and pointless it is because you either believe in something like religion (whether it be a religion of god, a religion of money or a religion of aesthetics), you believe that by squirting out progeny to go through the same level of pointlessness and meaninglessness it somehow means something or you just dont feel meaningless and pointless yet. either way you cut it i truly believe that if you have 15-20 seconds to think just before you die that you will 100% know what it is like to be pointless in all of your endeavours.