Super hero power problems and Cinquanta Centessimi

Hey you guuuuuuys

How are things chaps? Well, I assume. I know this leaves me open to be being called an ass, but it also makes an ass of you. So there.

I'm tired. I played football on Friday night with Patrick and his friends, and never before has there been such a display of technical wizardry and all round footballing genius. Unfortunately, none of this was coming from me, and we lost. As of yet, I don't have the skillz to pay the billz, and at 27 I'm starting to think that my destiny of playing professional football may have passed me by. Still, I could probably get a game for Scotland, as apparently you're never too old for that.

At an office I teach at I was idling away before my student arrived and in the corridor there are name badges of all of the people who work there. The woman who works next to my student has the amazing name (at least for me) of Rosalba Panico. Translated, this means Pink Dawn Panic. What. An. Amazing. Name. It sounds like it could be the name of a film featuring main characters based on Sarah Palin-types who fear a homosexual revolution. If this film is made, you read it here first and I want money for the name/concept.

Although I'm a hugely busy serious youngish person, I occasionally drift off. The burning issue that was occupying me the other day, as I'm sure it was with you, is this: If your super power was flight and you flew out of an enclosed space, surely you would really damage yourself. I mean, if you had only one super power (and flight is of course the best) and you had to escape from an enclosed space quickly like from inside a building or bus/train, you would really injure yourself when you hit the roof/wall. Often super heroes are shown blasting out of bank vaults under the sea or similar tricky situations. But if you only had flight and not super strength, after you said your witty catchphrase (e.g. "smell you later") and then tried to take off through the roof, you would always need a good amount of boost to break through the roof. But presumably you'd mangle your arm and your head when you hit the roof? This has made me doubt the veracity and reliability of super heroes.
As you are also no doubt doing, I'm now re-evaluating which super power I'd choose. Although perhaps because I spent so long thinking about this and have just written about it too, maybe my super power should be appearing interesting and ungeeky to women. It's quite a pickle. Flight would be nice though, saving me the ordeal of Ryanair.

And now, on to what is likely to be one of the few cultural difference type moments ever in this blog. In Italy they have words to describe ladies of the night of dubious merit, which I'm led to believe are troia, puttana or in Genovese, bagascia. However, these words also have the same significance as bitch in English, i.e. a woman that has wronged you in some way. So, one of the above Italian words means both bitch and prostitute in English, which as you know Dear Reader are different things (although not exclusively). Obviously I never use these words and will wash my eyes and brain out with soap for even looking at/thinking about such crudités. But it leads to misunderstandings if for example I were to talk about someone who I once knew but then upset me grievously and I described as a b!?@%. To the locals with their frankly foreign ways, this'd suggest that I have known prostitutes in the past, which I deny. And in return, when Italians want to say one of these words in English, they invariably plump for 'bitch' which makes them all sound like gangster rappers, albeit with a comedy Italian accent: "Een eeffect, eye waz woking een thee street toursday and eye so a beetch."

Time to go and make my pizza base, so until next time

Ciao ciao

Be Still My Beating Heart, among other things

Word up my peeps

Your gallant hero joins you continuing to clamber from the cusp of a coronary catastrophe. "Holy mackerel", I hear you not-imagine, let alone not-say! You see, I thought I'd lost my wallet the other day, which would have been quite massively disappointing. The fact that it's as empty as a prostitute's heart is neither here nor there, but it does have all of my cards and ID, and what with this being a country which is only in the developed world by geographical coincidence, I would not be confident of getting replacements quickly. Also, I couldn't be sure that I'd lost it and some scrote hadn't lifted it out of my pocket on the bus or something, which would really have been extracting the urine. But no, thankfully my work-trouser pockets gape as widely as the holes in Good Ol' Pope Benny's ideas that atheism equates to Nazism. But I don't particularly want to talk about that former Hitler Youth member as I've been reading a lot about his wee jaunt round Britain and it's getting a bit dull now.

In other news, last weekend was massively taxing. On Friday night I went to the pub for a wee while to try and retrace some forgotten steps from the previous weekend, which although didn't become a particularly heavy night was a late one. Then on Saturday I got up early (who knew that 10am exists at the weekend!?) to go and have a coffee with Clare, Patrick and their tiny baby girl Aoife. After a couple of hours of chatting with them and trying to say her name correctly, I wandered home for a wee sleep. Then, Saturday was White Night (which contrary to Dougie's idea, is not a racist party), and I met up with one of my students and his chums. Good times were had, until his girlfriend and her pal looked a bit drunk, so I asked if they were, which he said they weren't, to which I jokingly replied that he must need patience with someone with such a deplorable amount of joie de vivre. He then told her this and she looked a bit cross. I eventually got home at 6 for a few hours of sleep, before a pre-match beer or several. Refreshed and raring to go in (I'm mis-speaking here, I felt like death) I then stood and watched Genoa successfully implode for 70 minutes following a promising start. This was rubbish. The next day I didn't feel great, although my mood was cheered by the trousers of the previously mentioned student. They deserve a paragraph of their own, so here goes:

They are the gayest trousers in the world. They're lilac coloured, and frankly could only have been gayer if they were assless. The lesson seemed like a very short lesson, but maybe because I was laughing for about half of it. Otherwise he's normally quite a sharp dresser, even though he's Sampdoriano.

I've been here for about 5 weeks now, and the considerable war chest that I'd amassed in Scotland has all disappeared. Sadly, I'm skinter than someone's arms whose just come off a scooter. And it's still a while til pay day. This, combined with thinking that I'd maybe lived a touch too hard last weekend led to me deciding to try to abstain from the devil's brew for a week. Needless to say, I failed, but only by two bottles of beers at my mate Francesco's flat warming party. I'd love to say that I feel better for it, but as Winston Churchill said: "I pity those who do not drink, as when they wake up in the morning it's the best they'll feel all day."

In my last post I talked about the sense of uuuufff-ness towards living with new people again, which has been growing in me like the alien baby/egg in Alien*. I'm hoping to keep it enclosed in my chest for as long as possible, but in anticipation of it rupturing out in a haze of cheap but scary special effects, I've been seriously considering getting a single flat, or as the locals call them, a 'monolocale'. Indeed, I've even looked for them on t'internet, and there are a couple that look ok, but here they measure space in square-meters, which I'm lost with. I fully expect it to be tiny, but I'll see, it might be better than living with new people, I just dunno.


Until next time compadres, keep the faith

*I'm far too scared to ever watch all of this film, but have seen John Hurt's demise.

An Open Letter to Mosquitoes and other stuff

Dear Mosquitoes

I write this letter to you well aware that you are unlikely to 1) be able to read it and 2) even if you could, you probably wouldn't heed the warning contained. None the less I take this as a personal insult, as if Nick Griffin can read then presumably you, as fellow parasitic irritants, also can.

I freaking hate you. But unlike Wes Mantooth off of Anchorman, I cannot find it in myself to follow that with a "but Goddamn, I respect you". No, I can't, because that would be a lie, and only bad people lie. There is not one ounce of my body that contains anything except contempt and irritation for mosquitoes. Scotland is an oasis of cold weather, which your kind has not yet cursed with its pointless existence. The summer was a joyous release from your faint buzzing, and the really itchy pinpricks you leave us as mementoes.

Returning to Italy was very welcome, but just as fat people go through family packs of Mars bars and litres of Coke for a snack, so mosquitoes go through open windows. Perhaps it's my fault for leaving the windows open, but if you are currently considering subscribing to this line of thought and are a non-mosquito based life form, please stop reading. I only want people that agree and sympathise with me here, thank you very much.

Ok, so now they've all gone, let me continue. I am aware that my blood is not the type of blood that your average mosquito goes for, however, this does not stop the odd cursed-to-infinity-and-back l'il shite (as I like to think of them) having a wee taste. The first instance of this happened last week when I was cooking dinner. I still have the bite on my foot, thank you absolutely not. Then, a few nights ago, I was once again undertaking a culinary adventure when what should meander across my eyeline but, yes you guessed it, a mosquito. (If it wasn't a mosquito then what I'd written before that would be irrelevant and rambling. Oh.) Now, due to the heat and the lack of flatmates, I was cooking in my boxer shorts, as you do. With so much exposed china white flesh on show, I was worried that the l'il shite might try to bite my back or something. So, as any rational person would do, I stood with my back to the wall and tried to prepare the food. This is quite difficult when the cooker's at the other end of the room, by the way. I looked high, I looked low, but try as I might, the mosquito I could not find. Then, lo, it flew in front of me again, mocking me with its tiny tiny brain. So, while my food burned, I jumped around the kitchen trying to kill it. After a mere 15 minutes, the alien creature was vanquished, and is now only a smudge on the great wall of life and the kitchen.

So, let this be a lesson to all mosquitoes out there. If I see any of your kind again, I'll get all John Rambo on your collective asses (but not in the low body count stylings of Rambo 1, more like the bloated kill-all-of-Burma idea in Rambo 4). If I see you anywhere in my house, I will make it my mission to kill you. Then, as I've maybe got too much time on my hands, I'll wait until your children and relatives come to pay their condolences and then I'll kill them too.

So, mosquitoes, the choice is yours.

Yours hatefully,

Me.

.........................................................................................................................................................................

Now that I've got that off my chest, in other news, I've realised that I'm not that keen on other people being in what is ostensibly my house. There was a new guy who came a day or so ago to look at my old room, and he's taking it for next year. He seems perfectly nice, but trying to be nice and friendly to new people? Urgh. I think next summer I'll be ditching this whole co-living with strangers arrangement if it's at all possible.

So, in the spirit of being nice to Florian, I took him to La Lepre to let him see where I lay my hat, not to mention other things when I'm a bit pie eyed. It was all very nice, but there was a bit of a storm brewing with lots of atmospheric and cool thunder and lightning. Then, it started to rain. And rain. And rain. And rain. etc. It was probably the strongest rain that I've ever seen, and when we decided to try and venture home, the rain was literally pouring in rivers down the streets. It's hard to explain how heavy it was, so here's a picture of the amusingly called 'Alley of the Orefices:




This Saturday is White Night, which is another reason to have a few beers. This has made me reflect again on my time here, as my first White Night 2 years ago was both very good fun, and seems like only yesterday. Ho hum.

Brilliantly, this Sunday is also the first home game for the only team from the city of Genoa, and I'm hugely excited about this. Football and it's related sights, sounds and smells is an intoxicating mix, although the intoxication might have something to do with getting drunk at lunchtime. Bring. It. On. Forza. Genoa!

Ciao for now chumps and chumpettes, and congrats for getting to the end of this.

Death to mosquitoes!