perfection

i was at home waiting for my friend, A., to drop past. i got out of the shower, got dressed and went into the kitchen. i studied the fruit basket and decided on a Granny Smith apple.

i picked it up...

peeled off the sticker...

looked to see what my mum was doing (watching tv) and if dad was having a non computer moment (nope - booking flights for us on his laptop)

and stuck it on another apple in the fruit bowl.

i came into my room chomping on the apple to find an sms from my friend saying that i am 'perfection.'

uh-huh.

and it's not just that. there are rules to follow. i have a habit, i realised, of sticking orange stickers on other oranges, mandarine stickers on other mandarines etc etc. and only if it's the last in the bowl do i actually make the enormous effort of turning around and putting it in the bin. if that's not OCD, i don't know what is.

and if there's only a banana and an orange left in the bowl... well you can't go sticking an orange sticker on a banana. you have to throw it out.

the craziest part of it all is that i actually don't have OCD. i've seen many people with OCD, and there's not a shadow of a doubt that i don't have it. which means - i am just crazy, and far, far away from perfection. plus - if someone asked me to do something out of the routine i would do it - i just prefer doing it my way

and at the end of the week, when there's one lonely apply left in the fruit bowl, it's covered in a week's worth of stickers. and i'll be awoken by my brother standing over my bed shaking a sticker-covered apple at my face, yelling like a madman, 'THROW THEM IN THE BIN!'

why italians are not our choice

after the arranged marriage proposal my parents put forward to me, i saw my cousin who had actually asked her parents to find her a boy. upon my parents telling her that he was italian, she scrunched up her nose and said 'oh no, i'm not marrying an italian.'

'why not!?' all our parents cried in unison.

'for three reasons. one, he'll cheat on me. all italians our age think it's the normal thing to do. all italian guys have a girlfriend and a mistress. i don't want that. two, they all speak like morons. i don't want to be correcting my husband every day for the rest of my life because he says 'wif' instead of 'with'. they're all born in australia anyway, so they just like to sound stupid. and last (i pissed myself laughing when i heard this) i'm very family oriented, and i need to find a husband with no family, because i'm not giving up on seeing my family at all, and that way if he has no family we can both just go to my stuff. no italian boy has no family. so i don't know who i can marry.'

i don't know either!

arranged marriages... again

i have been watching my parent's reaction to A. and me breaking up. they've changed their game plan every week. so far this is what has unfurled:

week 1- absolute complete and total silence. they didn't ask me to clean my room, wash dishes, do a few loads in the laundry, nothing at all. it wasn't even like i couldn't have done those things, they were literally running around in circles doing everything before i got a chance to.

week 2- pretty much the same as week 1 but i just began to ignore them and did the normal cleaning i do at home. i don't really get how not making me clean was going to make me feel better, anyway.

week 3- dad booked me in for a whole day of weeding the garden. i'm serious. after around 4 hours of weeding he came up and informed me that 'weeding is very therapuetic you know.' aha, so now they're making their own therapies for me. it didn't matter though, i spent the whole time thinking about how much A. would have loved to be weeding the garden, in some old clothes and getting all dirty in the sunshine with our duck walking around.

week 3 1/2- mum and dad come home to find me drinking a beer with dinner. ONE BEER. i haven't had any sort of alcohol in i don't even know how long, cos i'm always dancing or working with kids. mum and dad began to question me about the boys i was going to the snow with, along with the comment 'you always drink when you're down.' insane. i drink around 8 standard drink per annum. spent the weekend away thinking how much A. would have loved snowboarding, not drinking and sleeping with guys who until very recently i thought were gay.

week 4- my family... lunch time... eating happily... suddenly dad explains that he's found me a husband, he's known him for a long time, and it's ok because he knows the family too and they're ok. mum turns to him and exclaims 'don't say that to Bee... (i'm thinking whew, he's only joking)... because now she's going to get stressed out when he comes to dinner.' what the hell... instant visions of my big fat greek wedding and disgusting men coming to the house. left the table before i could hear any more, so i'm not really certain if it's true or they were just joking. well, actually i left the table right after yelling that i will never marry an italian man because all italians are sleaze buckets and cheat on their wives. my parents think this is ridiculous because they have never cheated on one another. they're like the only ones.

anyway... bit scared as to what week 5 will bring... i'm trying to go out dancing as much as possible so therefore i won't be able to make the dinners with cheating italian men.

the pic above is the kind of northern italian guy our parents are expecting us to marry. the pic below shows what we are picturing...