Before my younger sibling arrived in CharmingVille yesterday, she’d been up and down Downunder searching for my favourite this ‘n’ that. You know the drill: big pants, the latest Tim Tam, vegetarian egg powder. She Vibered me assiduously, with photos. Which was lucky. Because her written communications looked something like this:
Her: Cld ony grt bl n sort of biurnt red pol fpe pa chrn not huge choive in hammo*.
Me: Your texting is hilarious.
Her: Im bling.
Her: Blond.
Her: Blind.
When my venerable sister ventures into the realm of digital telephony, she turns from a reasonably erudite and comprehensible Anglophone into, say, a Greek speaker in a gaggle of Mongolians, or how we sound to a dog. This is not just despite – or perhaps because of – predictive text, spell check and auto correct. She is a little bit blonde, and totally bling, but, bless her orthopaedic Tevas, her encroaching dotage has also rendered her blind as a noonday owl.
Like sands through the hourglass, time is rushing by we doddering siblings faster than an old bat out of an assisted living facility. ‘Oh no, Ruby!’ you protest. ‘Your skin is as soft as a tiny kitten’s downy arse. Your rhomboids remain sensually firm to the touch. Verily you are Helen to everyman’s Troy.’ Why, ευχαριστω dear reader. The fabled ‘CharmingVille Moist’ may be keeping my follicles deceptively plump and hydrated despite their years, but hey ho, the signs are there even without the aid of progressive lenses and an ear trumpet.
I’m as blind as my sister is, and I’ll never be thin again. No matter how many hours strapped into my inhaler gymside with my personal fitness dictator shouting himself hoarse, I can barely see over my commodious, Eric Kayser-sponsored ‘continental shelf’. Plus all the oil’s gone out me joints – against my better judgment, yesterday I decided to self-pedicure and ended up with a pulled hamstring and a wee accident in the lady parts department. Also a large section of lounge-room tile spastically daubed the very now shade of Tiffany Dawn. Jackson Pollock would’ve been proud, were he not already dead. No doubt we’ll be comparing notes in due course.
Most worryingly I’ve started to forget words. Though Bloody Marys are my spirit animal, I only commune once a week, and then just the one stupendous one at a certain speakeasy in 240½. Plus I’m off the Zolpidems and I haven’t smoked pot or eaten a disco brownie since the last election. I’m a little bit stressed and not sleeping as well as I could, but let’s face it: I’m hardly the ruler of the Free World. The strain of choosing which Koh Rong to go to for Christmas won’t likely nudge me over the brink into drooling senility.
But, like every first-world, hypochondriac narcissist with nothing better to do when you find a lump on your thingamajig or a nasty erg on your dangleberry, I turned to Dr Google and self-administered the SAGE test. I may or may not have a brain tumour and/or whatever Lupus is, but I don’t seem to have dementia yet either. I still know my harps from my rhinos, and I’m pretty sure it’s November something. Still, my days are filled with ‘Can we go to the thing to get the thing?’ and ‘Honey, have you seen where I’ve put my… (trails off as I forget what it is I was looking for)?’ During a hot flush bonanza at work I asked my deskmate to point the ‘wind bicycle’ in my direction.
But hold the plastic box that voices come out of! Although I have not one iota of Khmer to my name despite hitching my love truck to a local life partner, I do know that Khmer takes up 2/3 more space on signs and in that folding gazette with dead bodies on the front that people read every morning. This is because Cambodians use a lot of descriptive phrases where we barang use a single word. Bank is ‘building with money in it’.
Bingo! All this time immersed Bodes-side is not enfeebling my mind at all but has osmotically transferred a wealth of linguistic knowledge: deep inside my brainbox I can speak perfect Khmer and it’s just a matter of time before I find the bloody unlocker thingy.
*I will give $10 to the first person who correctly guesses what this means and isn’t my sister