It's not that I haven't lived before, but I have certainly put limits on what I will and will not do dependent on my comfort zone. And moving to the other side of the world has blown that whole way of life out of the water.
Reading 'The Yes Man' by Danny Wallace has also had an effect - for those of you who haven't read it, I highly recommend it. The guy is an absolute nutter!
So here we are - I'm blogging as part of my new lifestyle. Not exactly crazy is it but I've never done it before so here goes.
Choosing something to actually blog about wasn't difficult. Finding myself in new situations because of my new attitude to 'try new things' has brought me to meet some very weird and wonderful people in a very short space of time. Rather than trawling back over the last couple of weeks and talking about my experiences of Sydney folk so far, such as the woman on the bus to Glebe who had red lipstick dots all over her face and stripped off to ask if the general public thought she looked fat, I thought I'd kick this off with talking about the very odd man I met in a bar last night while the whole experience is still firmly printed on my mind - in fact it will haunt me for a while.
A group of friends/colleagues and myself were standing at a nice bar in North Sydney (the Greenwood to be precise) when an Aussie guy approached to ask me firstly if I was English and secondly if he could buy me a drink. At the time, I thought he was offering to buy me AND my friend Flick a drink but apparently he was homing in on me.
At this point, Flick said, (pointing to a guy in our group) "he's English, are you going to buy him a drink too?" to which he replied "I only like English girls". Now, that wasn't too weird given the context, what straight, Aussie guy would offer to buy another random bloke a drink after all?
Now, neither me nor Flick fancied this guy - he was much older than us and had something a little bit strange about him, such as a lack of co-drinkers. So we politely declined his offer, to which he seemed to take offense. Flick then explained that by accepting a drink from him, we would effectively be signing ourselves up to a conversation - he looked hurt.
I felt bad so changed my mind and accepted so went with him to the bar. Flick had well and truly done one at this point. Something in me makes me much more tolerant than my friends when it comes to talking to twitching strangers. I find them interesting.
Stood at the bar, the man explained how the whole drink offering scenario had now made him feel uncomfortable. So there we were, stood at the bar, with nothing to say to each other, in a state of complete awkwardness with him asking for a round of drinks that he no longer wanted to buy. So I paid for them - well it eased the situation momentarily.
In an attempt to make him feel better about the whole thing, I began asking questions. Just the usual small talk bollocks like "so what do you do?" Again, he took offense. He commented that by me asking him this, I would cast assumptions on who he was as a person. Now the guy has a point, but I explained that I wasn't prying or intending on being judgmental, I just thought there might be some common ground there. After all, a flowing discourse between parties can really fucking help a strained conversation. And I also mentioned that if I was going to be judgmental, I would have walked away at the point he spilled beer all down himself - twice.
So I tried another question "what were you doing in Philadelphia for three months?" Again, he didn't want to answer. So now, I had found myself alone with a weird guy, who I had ended up buying a drink, who really didn't want to reciprocate the verbal part of the whole encounter.
Then we found a mutual talking spot he was comfortable with - the Foo Fighters. The gem I took away from that dialogue was that Dave Grohl is good with a crowd. Enlightening stuff.
So moving on, I began to talk about how I wanted to start some singing lessons (notice it is me doing pretty much all of the talking). I banged on about my aspirations to get back into theatre for a few minutes - the one way conversation was wine fueled.
Now, here's for the crescendo. The part of the surreal experience that blows me away. The finishing sentence that was uttered from this socially inept man's lips which made me feel sick for reasons other than the amount of booze I had consumed - "do you sing while you are having sex?"
I stared - then I stared some more. Then I got the fuck out of there.
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