Model Behaviour

It's been a while since my last blog about the random sex pest I met in the Greenwood and I wanted to pick this thing up and continue with the noting down of learnings brought about by my inquisitive side when I have had a few glasses of Sauvignon Blanc.

Since I am blogging about Weird and Wonderful people, and the last one was pretty weird, I thought I'd shake it up a bit and go with wonderful this time.

And so it goes...last night we were out with a friend of mine who had just finished her last day at her current job and following a bottle or two, it was announced that we were heading to the Ivy. Now for those of you who don't know the Ivy, it is a picturesque bar spot of the city, with a large outdoor area, fairy lights and a spiral staircase leading up to the VIP bars. There is also a swimming pool on the top floor but this bit is kept for the elite apparently. The Ivy has been described in Time Out as a place where you go 'to see and be seen'. I resent that quote...they won't let me upstairs.

So we are on our way from the comfort zone of Ryan's Bar to the not so comfortable Ivy (I guess that depends on one's perceived position in the social food chain) and due to my thongesque footwear, I already had doubts on my admittance to the bog standard bar area, let alone the bit where the important people go.

We arrive at the entrance on George St to be greeted by a little blonde beauty who asks the crucial question "how many of you are there?" Between us, we managed to figure out there were five. "Oh, well in that case you'll have to go to the back entrance". Firstly, "why?" and secondly..."why?" But rather than argue, we took ourselves off on the 200 metre journey that eventually brought us to the back of the building. On the way round in seek of the winding queue that would lead us to the venue only dreams could compete with, we got to see a tramp, some people eating their dinner and....and well that's it. In fact, the queue wasn't even visible. Not a pretentious looking doorman in sight. Were we the only minions here tonight? Had the rest of the rifraf decided to stay for one more in Ryan's?

As the realisation dawned on me that we had ended up at exactly the same entrance we would have come to had we been allowed through the golden gates of Heaven, I started to question my own self worth and where I ranked in the pecking order. Afterall, I had just done the walk of shame into this metrosexual swankhole. Were they going to tattoo my forehead with "I came in the back way...(which is the same as the front way only takes six times longer) ?"

Anyway, negativity aside, later in the evening I met a woman who struck a chord with me. She was a friend of a friend's friend, a woman in her mid thirties but who clearly felt she stuck out like a sore thumb because of the fact she was older than us and had two kids. As I was left alone with her and her friend while my mate went to buy drinks, I began to talk the biggest amount of shit I have spoken in 2009 and I am not sure why. Conscious of this, I started to feel uncomfortable so began mentally exploring the archive of stories locked away in my mind that would fit my mate's law of socially acceptable anecdotes of F.R.I (funny, relevant or interesting - any one of the three is fine). But this lady stopped me in my tracks and just began a normal conversation.

I know this sounds weird but it's moments when a complete stranger senses you feel a little out of depth and come to your rescue with a soft smile and genuine interest in you that make you feel so relaxed and safe in the big wide world. You rarely meet people who make you feel this way, and those you do, I try to take a leaf from their book, or better still, keep them as friends. That's why I have the people around me I do.

It wasn't just her ease to be around that had me intrigued, but the story she later told me of her recent discovery that her husband of 13 years had been having an affair for five of them. Two kids in and the guy decided that this was a good time to start playing away from home. Now obviously I only got one side of the story but what a fucking jerk? Five years man - grow some balls.

She looked so lovely, with long blonde hair and black evening dress. I wanted to stand next to her in my scruffy shorts and flipflops by contrast to make her stand out even more.

And so her night was about catching up with some friends and making the most of the babysitter, and gliding through what clearly wasn't the night she'd hoped would make everything feel better again with such grace and elegance and hope for the future. These people are what make me tick. The ones that get shit dropped on them from 30 thousand feet and think 'well at least it wasn't 40 thousand'.

I'm glad I met that inspirational lady.

New Beginnings

Since moving to Sydney from London two weeks ago, I've have made it part of my mission statement to try new things, meet new people, go to new places and generally be open to ideas - well it's the perfect time to start living.

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.