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Dislocation and the Politics of Bar Pick-me-ups.

A rather over-dressed me went out late last night, alone, with a singular thought. To do whatever the hell I felt like doing. I had no one to meet, nothing to buy, and naught to see. It’s about that time of the month again, and I felt terribly displaced, oversexed, and angsty.

Wandered around quite a bit, ate too much Pistachio ice-cream (it’s my favourite flavour this month; Gourmet Ice-cream is one of my biggest vices, and I have come to the resolution that I shall only eat Gelare or Movenpick.) Eventually found myself at Emerald Hill. For some reason I walked into No. 5, perhaps hoping that by some cosmic quantum quirk, or quantum cosmic quirk, I’d bump into the G-Spot. No such luck. Ended up at the al-fresco dining area just outside rouge instead, at a cute-guy spotting.

Went up to him and asked if he was waiting for anyone. Unfortunately yes, his best buddy and a blind date called Rosie, apparently. (She was quite the Posie; a pudding and pie sort of girl in black and denim with nothing interesting to say.)

So I’m an eavesdropper, now you know! But everybody eavesdrops. Especially on me, and good on them because I tell great stories. Nothing beats the time I recited lines from a play in which my character was suffering from colon cancer (it was really supposed to be liver cancer, but the director got a little carried away with the alliteration, and no one realized the mistake for many rehearsals.)

Sat alone for a long while reading Blue of Noon, trying my best to concentrate and seem like a literary buff. I knew he was watching me, and felt like I had to prove I’m not some ditzy, desperate girl. I’m not, really, just needed to talk to someone last night. Well, I suppose you could see that as desperation. Crazy, friendless girl in a brocade dress and face paint screaming silently look-at-me.

There happened to be a mildly attractive fellow sitting on the other side of the little street that ran through the bistro and I’d notice him for quite a long while already. And I kept on thinking, go to him? Try to catch his gaze and wink? That stupid cute guy keeps glancing at me, if I hook up with the one across, I’d totally come across as an SPG out hunting, but I’m really not, Oh I’m so fucking bored and I feel so lonely and I need to talk.

So from the strange mechanism of my childish mind I drew a note (replicated below) and got the waitress to pass it to him.

It says, Dislocation is my least favourite feeling, want to join me in brooding on that?

I don’t quite know what we talked about, but apparently we both didn’t like, or finished, Michel Houellebecq’s Atomized. He was here on business for the first time in a long time and thought that the Singaporean brand of efficiency was absolutely bizarre (They time you down when you cross the road? Isn’t that taking the want for precision a little to the extreme!)

Our conversation fluctuated between the mundane (The Economist’s article on the city’s totalitarian Lee® brand of governance) to the subliminally erotic, to the out-rightly crass (Teenage lesbians, threesomes and how Germans were ‘boring but effective’)

It got late, and as much as I didn’t like pulling out on him, I did. With the lamest possible phrase too.

“I’ve seen more of the country in the past three hours with you then I did in the past week… I wonder what sights the next three would churn out.”

“Uh… I have to go to church in a few hours.”

British men are strange, but in a way I really enjoy. They keep saying they’re absolutely vulgar and that the only activity they do outside work that could possibly be of any interest would be to get drunk and behave really badly. Well, I’ve never seen them when they hang with their mates, but they’re always insanely well behaved around women. Maybe it’s a really mis-guided opinion on my part, but I think I must probably have had the least physical contact with them.

I don’t know really. Is it the way they’re brought up, or some kink in their society that disapproves, more strongly (in relative terms), of vulgar, promiscuous behaviour? The ones I know never ‘come on too strong’; and by happenstance, when they do admit they want to fuck your brains out and have been wanting to for a long time (only you don’t know it because they’ve treated the whole affair up till then with unnecessarily excessive reticence), they do it with the candour of, oh-I –don’t-know/don’t want to say it; basically, they don’t get very frank until the last possible moment.

But perhaps it’s just me. Perhaps I’m used to vulgar, crass, Tarzan/Jane expressions. Used to the kissing of unknown lips and the squeezing by unknown hands. Which is really not something I’m bitter about, or have much of an opinion on, for that matter.

Xoxox