Category: Guilty Pleasures

When I was 10 I hurled all over the handbag department in Macy’s, San Francisco.

The eye-watering miasma from an adjacent fragrance counter, the hot fug of a superheated winter shop and a gutful of warm Orange Julius were too much for this little hippie. As my mortified, tether-end mother tissued the ralph off an oxblood Aigner saddlebag purse, the fastidiously coiffed shop assistant barely turned a hair as she eyed the dripping selection of technicolour accessories I’d just added to her display. She sat Mum and me down, both of us retching and watery eyed, and called for a janitor over the PA in a calm, euphonious drawl. Later an unfussed, sympathetic in-house nurse soothed me with lemonade in a sippy cup as I lay for a half hour in a tight white bed in the company sickbay. Americans were so nice, I decided. Perhaps even nicer than my own family. When it came time to leave, I clung to the doorman’s legs all the way to the taxi stand.

I’d almost forgotten this ignominious public upchuck until last Saturday here in CharmingVille. At precisely 1.45pm, me and my newly arrived niece were in a southbound tuk tuk on Riverside, tummies full of Metro fries, winging our way towards an afternoon of Snapchat by the pool.

As we sped through K-West corner, a midlife barang stepped into traffic and without warning mustered a passable Linda Blair right there in broad daylight. He missed us, only just, but dusted the toesocks of his surprised Khmer bride with what appeared to be 27 Screwdrivers and half a chicken schnitter.

“OH-EM-EFF-GEE. Like did that just literally like just happen?” squealed young Renesmee-Katniss-JonquilI-Pear by my side. “I can’t even. Hashtag DOUBLE YOU-TEE-EFF. Hashtag Whaaat? Hashtag Blaaart!” Luckily for Old Mate, 15 minutes of fame is now down to 10 seconds unless you take a screenshot. The traffic had slowed just long enough for my young charge to snap a selfie with spewling drunkard as photobomb, which she immediately sent to the internet. In less time than it takes to shotgun a 12oz Jack ‘n’ Coke, hundreds of spotty bonglords across Australia’s suburban badlands cacked themselves watching a feckless sexpat stagger through a day in his own personal struggletown.

Despite her confident use of social media, my sister’s youngest is also a little wobbly on her feet right now. Thanks to her naturally trusting nature, youthful sense of adventure and some catastrophically mean girls, she’s momentarily dropped out of a parochial lucerne-league Snob College in a well-known farming district in southern Australia. In a narrative arc worthy of a postmodern GOT subplot, she took a part-time job packing groceries into Range Rovers, as it happens mostly belonging to the mums of the malicious little crackers who were giving her grief.

This was not ideal, so for the next few weeks she’s calling CharmingVille home, taking a breather and, to my surprise since I’m not a fan of Devil’s Spawn per se, refreshing my air supply too. Over brunchtime bellinis we’ve talked boys, boobs, booze, books, bleach and buds of both varieties among a million other cool auntie/cooler kmoy subjects. We both agree Tony Abbott is an utter knob. We disagree on acrylic nails. I’m not keen on short shorts or hair extensions, but I’ll defend her right to wear them, especially in the face of Bindi Irwin and the other smug bodyshamers who’ve conspired to make this sensational young woman’s life a misery.

Leaving Marital HQ prior to our ooky puke encounter, my neighbours mistook us for mother and daughter. I was stoked. I find myself enthralled by her Saturday-night war stories and slip into ‘aiights’ with ease. She even calls me by name, the ‘auntie’ prefix dropped. Things were never like this when I was a niece, let alone a 10-year-old kid stood in a puddle of my own creation. It’s sick. But in a good way.

Later, as we sallied past that heaving old feller, I thought to myself: ‘There but for the grace of…’ etc, etc. “Hashtag YOLO motherfucker!” was what I actually said, though.

 

If you can’t beat ‘em, you might as well set the alarm and put the kettle on. This past week or so, like everyone in CharmingVille, I’ve been snacking on time-inappropriate fingerfood and yelling ‘GOAL!’ at the top of my lungs at 3 in the morning. First it was the Champion’s League, and now this thing in Brazil. I’ve become quite the aficionado. Just ask me anything. Like: ‘Ruby, I’m drawn to the matador machismo and palpable cocksmithery of Cristiano Ronaldo, but I’ve gone off him a bit over that shock drubbing by the Germans. Plus that red uniform doesn’t make his tan pop the way I like. I think Messi is the better player even though he looks like my cousin from 1978. I was planning to have sex with him and give him the best damn root he’s ever had in his life. What do you think?’

Firstly, my friend, I think you are a warm and generous person. Lionel should be very grateful for your offer. The gift of screaming climax is an awesome ‘Thanks’ any of us would be happy to get. But I hate to rain on your Carnaval. ‘Mas por que você precisa chover na minha festa de rua?’ I hear you say. Because, my dear, sex for our Leo is no more thrilling than going down the PandaMart or talking poolroom colourways with his good lady wife. That genius tinyman gets all the gasping ecstasy he needs from things like kicking his first goal at the World Cup in eight years. Not one of us, not even you, could make him feel how he looked at that moment. Switch on your YouTube and go to the bit at 64:29ish where he miraculously slots it in for Argentina if you don’t believe me. Look at that feisty little fellow run and roar with joy, every neck vein a-pop, in front of 100,000 people shrieking and writhing in mutual, euphoric abandon. Right afterwards a wing of his bellowing, hardbody BFFs descends to ruffle his mullet and give him a nice cuddle. Perhaps a surreptitious spoon, even. Or just a quick cup. Whatever. Anyway. The vídeo cuts off after this (no doubt for privacy’s sake) but with all that explosive emotion released I guarantee he probably had a little cry. There now. I rest my case.

I know the Cambodian national soccer team must be taking a few leaves out of Mr Magic Messidonna’s World Cup playbook. They should. As you know I have my finger on the throbbing pulse of worldwide footballery, and The Angkor Warriors aren’t exactly kicking goals. Apparently they haven’t really since booting Yemeni arse back in ‘66. They’re trying, though. I bumped into the lads in my quest to find a CharmingVille gym that a) doesn’t have mushrooms tumescing from carpet, b) isn’t sick with swaggering narcissists shooting up HGH in the towel cupboard, or c) won’t charge an arm and a leg to wait for the StairMaster while some bodyguarded minor royal trots through her spider solitaire session. Going to a new gym is like Day One at the office or the first day back at juvie. You don’t know where anything is and what the naked/not-naked protocol is in the change rooms. The latter was solved for me by the tiny towels. Whilst no doubt perfect for Lionel’s compact rig, I am a grown woman of luxurious proportions. I could cover front bottom or back bottom but not both at the same time. Boobs didn’t get a look in either way.

No matter which hurt locker I pick, I always start with a cheeky 30 on the treadmills. This particular morning everyone bar the middle machine was thumping and rolling with mid-session fit-ballers looking professionally intense, eyes fixed on the salutary replay of the debaculous stoush between Croatia and Cameroon playing on every dashboard.

I fit right in between two glistening, rhythmically grunting internationals, hardly believing my luck. I batted my good eye and let my shoulder strap slide in the hope one of them might shoot a wink my way or even let slip the strip. No dice. These guys were grimly pumping towards elusive, ecstatic transcendence and I was out of my league.

Lionel already knows the score. For sure most nights when he’s not practicing his star jumps in his private gym or coming up with some great new smoothie recipes, him and Antonella must just lie in bed holding hands.

After dozens of Saturdays lying down in the air-con at 9pm and playing Sudoku on my phone until de la Gare’s finest kicks in, the other weekend I made myself do two things long, if not well, after bedtime.

Firstly a generous but foolhardy acquaintance invited me to drinks with some proper rich people at one of CharmingVille’s five-star hotels. I surprised myself and went. The spangled attendees weren’t just circumstantially well off because three-grand-a-month-goes-a-long-way-when-you’re-living-in-a-third-world-country. They were secret Swiss bank account, island-owning, red-soled pumps loaded.  It was supposed to be a casual thing and I took them at their word. I put pants on. I was wearing shoes. Come on now. But when I arrived, there was an imported Viennese string quartet playing baroque hits in the vestibule. Shit. Except for a matronly NGO freegan in an elephant skirt and electric blue Tevas, everyone else had, as my Nana used to say, ‘made the effort’.

You can forgive the social development lady her execrable Christianist wardrobe choices as she was most likely from Ohio. Be that as it may. I’m a faux-artsy, demi-mondrian layabout with a whisper of a job and frankly tenuous raison d’etre. Wearing a lot of black and looking angsty might still work in Zagreb. But here, midst the scent of fougere and ease, my imposterment was shag-like. I had on bright yellow $2 eyeshadow from Soriya, for fuckssake. I might as well have had a thumping great neon rhino horn nailed to my forehead. Or at least my skirt tucked into my undies at the back. Even though I wasn’t wearing either I furtively checked my reflection in the ice sculpture at the elaborate hand-caught wild salmon tableau.

The ladies, mostly white and mostly in their 40s, had plenty of appropriate clothes on. I saw an actual Von Furstenberg wrap dress and a Pucci blouse.  No one had lipstick on their teeth and there wasn’t a daisy pedicure in sight. They waved their tinkly gold bangles and nano-talked golf. Their men wore suits but weren’t sweaty at all. I wanted to bury my face in everyone’s hair.  Instead, under the guise of plucking an airborne canapé from a passing tray, I discreetly smelt my own armpit just in case. All in order in that department. Yay me.

Drinks were French and free. After a few fortifying sorties to the bar, I managed a halting conversation with an investment banker about rabies, and confused some nice women with an inappropriate and nervous burble about Vincent d’Onofrio, with whom I have an unhealthy TV relationship.

Forty seven minutes after I arrived I slipped out on a nature break and kept going, but not before stuffing my Olympic PVC cheetah skin handbag with tiny snacks. These came in handy for later.

Back at Marital HQ Hubster had set the alarm for 1.45am for us to watch 22 cashed-up Spanish soccer crumpets sashay around a pitch for 90 minutes. ¡Ay caramba! All that thrilling manly hugging, prayerful fist biting and primordial, goosebumpy chest beating. Plus the bonus off-pitch, head-in-hands thespianism from Armani-suited second stringers watching from the sidelines. There was a lot of expensive grooming and Bon Jovi teeth on display, and who doesn’t love a good dark stovepipe pant with a sharply fitted jacket on a superfit twentysomething beardyman with blue eyes and olive skin?

Anyway. We quite enjoyed the first half rooting for those shaggy underdogs Atletico. While Hubster cracked open a dozen consecutive ABCs I sipped mint tea and gorged on the contraband canapés. But after a lacklustre middle and the equaliser by shiny white Real in the dying stages, I knew it was all over. The fastidiously groomed Cristiano Ronaldo ripped his top off at the end apparently, but I missed it because by then I was a bit bored. I’d gone back to bed for some critical beauty sleep, though I admit to a modest nest egg set aside for a little nip ‘n’ tuck when the time comes. Apparently that’s sooner than I’d hoped for: the ladies earlier did tell me there’s a guy in town who does nice work. Money’s like beauty steroids for average-looking people. Have you seen young Cris’s before pictures? These days he’s magnificently bangin’ but I would be too if I got paid $100,000 a day.

 

One day this week, as I was cleaning my teeth, I discovered I could make my boobs go up and down, independently of each other and at the same time, using nothing but the sheer herculean strength of my gym-nascent pectoral muscles. This is no mean feat. Each stupendous globe weighs as much as a cat. I know because I got out the kitchen scales. Then I put Pharrell on and we had a dance. I even Vibered the Hubster at work to let him know the good news. He sent me a nice emoticon flower. But like Tinder, kale smoothies and motos in the rain, even getting happy with your chesticles becomes old hat fast. In case I had something more diverting and life affirming up my sleeve, I skimmed through My List Of Things To Do Today:

1. Pay big blue water bottle dude.

2. Go to Central Market/buy new pasta strainer.

3. Buy paint. Paint over grubby fingermarks from            air-con repair guy.

4. Buy bleach + toothbrush/scrub grout.

5. Toenails?

I looked at my toenails with a question mark. I’d made my List in bed the night before, just after two stiff bloody marys and a cheeky Xanax left over from New Year’s. What was the roadmap for my wayward talons? Paint? Cut? Instagram? Was it a trick question? Stumped, I filed them away in the enervated mañana basket of my mind. Back at the List, I was dismayed to find four out of the five Things To Do needed pants on. Mission critical to three of them was actually stepping outside. I opened the window and put my hand in the outdoors. Barely 10 o’clock in CharmingVille and hot as the hinges of Hell. I had to find something at least mildly interesting and moderately useful to do that included icy cold air-con. For once I decided it couldn’t be playing Facebook, taking online personality tests or wrecking a third blender trying to make hummus off the internet.

Soon after I was colour coding my shoes and listening to a free sample of Rob Lowe’s new audio book to kill time before Law and Order. I plucked my eyebrows. I looked in the fridge 500 times. Ours beeps if you leave the door open too long. I spent a while seeing how far I could close it before it stopped beeping. Turns out it only stops when fully closed. Good to know. The Bunster was panting a bit having spent half an hour on the balcony eating his own poo. He seemed to be enjoying it. But I gave him an ill-conceived sponge bath anyway, which ended in me asking Dr Google if you can catch rabies from rabbits, via a long detour through some disturbing cat gifs.

It was in the middle of this flurry of activity that the power went out.

This was not the bad part. We’ve all been around long enough to hear the collective groans of an overheated, entertainment-free neighbourhood reverberate down each searing street. And the cheers as, a sweaty hour later, everything turns back on.

The bad part began when, during the quiet left behind after electricity is gone, I noticed a hairline crack appearing in the thin veneer of busywork, existential clock-watching and emotional jazz hands I’ve plastered over everything. Ennui and Malaise, those continental nemeses, for the first time accompanied by doleful, snivelling Loneliness, crept through my ever-widening gap. Merde. This hole thing threatened to turn a vaguely promising afternoon quickly and dramatically downhill. I admit I momentarily succumbed and threw myself onto the hard cold tile, blubbing and raging into my neatly rainbowed orthotics. Everybody else is having such a great time. I see their picture on Facebook yukking it up with plenty of sexy offline Brazilian friends on a sunset boat. Or eating smart canapés at yet another important basket-weaving exhibition. Normal people go out to dinner in big laughy groups, stay out after 9, run around the park and discuss the cultural zeitgeist over wheatgrass after yoga.

But as those three killjoys loitered in the corner laughing and pointing as my middle-class, first-world, paper-thin walls came tumbling down, my phone vibrated off the bedside table. It was one of the two-and-a-half people who’d actually leave their house for me, inviting me out for a dinner and a movie, followed by a nightcap and gossip chez them. Those whiny interlopers vanished. I found some pants and vowed that with friends like these, I need more. The thing is to get out amongst it. Even if it’s hot and I’m not Brazilian. I turned to grab my keys and Bunster was back on the balcony, despite the heat, eating his own poo, and smiling right at me. I smiled back. It was, coincidentally, the very moment that the lights went on.

 

At 7.30 this morning I saw a penis. I’m a big fan of the little man, so nine inches out of ten this would usually be a welcome start to my day. I’d be chuffed, for example, had I spied a demi-tumescent David on a morning stroll through my Renaissance sculpture garden. Or looked up at the right time at the matinee of a Buns of Steel Vegas hen’s bender. Or been awoken beachside at the Aegean’s premier nudist resort by a wine-dark Adonis bearing dawn cocktails.

Alas, the male part I scoped from my dim-sum-bound tuk tuk was a policeman’s sorry fingerling answering the call on the wall of Sisowath High. He and his mate had just come off shift extorting money from kids not wearing helmets. Maybe, like many members of the animal kingdom, corrupt cops mark their territory. Devil-may-care middle-class Scoopy riders are probably worth their weight in Muscle Wine back at the squad room. Maybe he was just a lazy prick who should have known better, being a role model for the Future of Cambodia and all. Perhaps I’m being uncharitable. The poor fellow may have real health issues. Incontinence can be a consequence of Type 2 diabetes, plus this little piggy was no manorexic. Probably thanks to stealing all that candy from babies.

But maybe he was just too exhausted to make it back to HQ; our law enforcement officials have been so busy lately, after all. Whatever his excuse, there’s not one for flailing his weensy hose willy-nilly in full view of Norodom peak-hour traffic. Oh. Maybe he was drunk. So that’s OK then. Whatevs. It was enough to put me off my chicken paws.

Unless we’re a nutter, or drug fucked, or it’s New Year’s Eve 1998 in the Mount Gambier Safeway car park, we women don’t just drop trou and piss all over town. We plan ahead, or find a dunny while we’re out and about, or just hold it. If this sounds like sour grapes, I admit I’m occasionally envious of the practical aspects the male member affords, most so when I need to spend a pretty penny or twenny. I’ve lamented my lack of convenient tonk on many a miasmic loo stop en route to Temple Town. Or after one too many vodka Red Bulls in the aptly named ‘powder room’ of <insert noxious nightclub here>, scowling and Pretzel-legged for 20 minutes until the inevitable sextet of ladyboys and strumpets tumble giggling from the only unclogged cubicle.

And though there are fewer people to disgust if you’re caught short outdoors outback Downunder, seeing a man about a dingo can nevertheless be fraught. I love camping: sausages and sauce in bread for breakfast, leaping into remote lakes with your togs off, watching your shirtless bronzed beau and his hot mates stride across the Gibber Plains towards a galah-pink sunset. But after a day frolicking in exhausting nature it’s hard to relax with a slab and a fire-side round of Michael Row The Boat Ashore when you know later there’s a life-threatening chance you’ll dock with a 300-year-old fire ant colony or douse a previously sleeping eastern brown snake of the trouserless kind.

Plus I don’t know if you’ve been outside with thousands of miles of moonless night around you and not a soul in sight, but it’s a bit spooky. Which means you have to coerce someone to go with you; certainly not the private comfort stop everyone was hoping for. During daytime it’s even harder. It’s not exactly old growth rainforest out beyond the black stump. You’ll be lucky to find a tiny bush, let alone a rocky outcrop. A fluorescent white arse is not naturally camouflaged in the wide brown motherland I used to call ‘home’. A bit of old stick doesn’t provide a colossal bot any protection from the airhorns of a gurning trucker clocking 200 down the highway. He can see you 20 miles off and by jingo he lets you know about it.

CharmingVille’s not the only place on the planet where blokes unzip and let rip, and our coppers aren’t the only ones painting the town yellower than a colonial pile and stinking up the great outdoors. But lads: just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. You’re pissing all over your Kingdom, fellas! Only the other night, incidentally during a nature break between episodes of Idol, I heard an epic voiceover on a StarWorld station ident dramatically intone: ‘Home is not the house that you sleep in, but the place where you stand.’ Exactly. And who wants to be standing in their own wee?

 

One morning last month, naked and shivering in my parents’ guest bathroom, I lubed myself from head to toe with half a tub of Body Shop Nut Butter in preparation for some vigorous exercise al fresco.

As a long-time resident of the ever-moist CharmingVille, I usually glisten like an unctuous seal. But after a KNY fortnight Down Under on a power shopping spree ‘n’ parental pilgrimage, my skin was dry as a chip.

Except for a few warm, wet nooks up north, the antipodean atmosphere desiccates a tropical pelt. And autumn down south can be bitter. Not Yakutsk in January, granted, but still. Even a few hours’ exposure tramping from mall to dire mall to tick off my ‘Only-in-Oz’ shopping list (orca-fit cotton underpants, obscure electric toothbrush heads, Spanx™) and I itch and whine until even my deaf mother pulls across three lanes of oncoming traffic so she can dump me on the kerb to find my own way home.

I don’t know if you’re entering middle age and have been recently abandoned in an IKEA car park late on Easter Sunday in a third-tier Australian suburb by your 74-year-old mother, but it really confirms that one of you is the worst person in the world. Luckily she couldn’t work the GPS and after circling the trolley park had to come back so I could help her find the exit. Me and Mum. Probably a good thing we don’t share a hemisphere.

Anyway, as the morning chill goosed my every bump and sucked the juice from every pore, I prepared thusly for my am ‘run’ – all 325 metres of it – which I’d promised my Bodes-side gym instructor I’d do during my trip. Well, I promised him I’d do an hour of meaningful exercise every morning. But these days I’m barely Australian, let alone Christian, and in the lead-up to Khmer New Year I’d forgotten about the whole Easter thing. Jogging past a nearby strip mall wearing a sweatband, tearfully discovering a giant chocolate bilby centrepiece outside the Jobcentre, detouring through the front bar of the local and tottering back to base, hours later, cheeks stuffed with Caramello Koalas, is probably not what he meant. But anyway.

I felt a bit weird caressing myself with a fistful of fair-trade nut fat while Mum and Dad shambled next door in the kitchen. I could hear them stacking the breakfast dishwasher and talking in Old Person (‘Is it bin night tonight? What time does Eggheads come on? Is it bin night tonight?’), but needs must. My epidermis rustled. Like a fragrant but shameful Channel swimmer, I checked and rechecked the lock on the folk’s facilities before waxing on. Given my generous acreage this took longer than ages, and after a while I started to think about the Bodes: the Hubster, the Bunster, pork noodles on a Sunday morning. My thoughts wandered. Now don’t take this the wrong way (if you’re American, it’s not too late to go get a donut), but they wandered to how much I missed bum guns. Mum and Dad had trucked in the best loo paper money can buy, but nothing gets you feeling fresher than a pre-paper blast from the elephant-in-the-room of personal hygiene. I found myself reaching for a phantom squirter on more than one occasion. Pavlov would have smirked knowingly. Though I often whinge and carp about all things KOW, I was shocked at how acclimatised I’ve become.

On holidays in a town with three Targets, four Officeworks and a couple of overrated pandas on a sex-exchange programme, you’d think I’d died and gone to Adelaide. I admit I revelled in my choice of pickled walnuts and cheap gossip mags. I kicked red leaves down the street and rollicked in the dog park with tick-free Tilly, Smokey and Rex. Cold Chisel is still on high rotation if you like that kind of thing. But as the normcore days wore on I began to yearn for old CharmingVille’s quirk and edge. I venture we even have better mod-cons here, too: free wifi, world’s best Bloody Marys, one-dollar eyebrow waxing.

And while the days chez rellies were chilly, the nights had me almost weeping for my adopted home and Marital HQ. Of a sub-Arctic eve, tucked up in the bed where I suspect Gramps drew his last breath in 1988, the jolly thump of the disco tuk tuk was replaced by the council rubbish truck and incessant beep of the nearby pedestrian crossing.

As much as I love my olds, and no matter where I am, I yearn to sit on my CharmingVille balcony in knickers and a T-shirt, any late afternoon of the sweltering year, and feel that portentous wind-rush just before the hot drama of a calamitous, all-night thunderstorm. I almost always feel good in my skin here. And my arse is home and hosed.