Dec 6, 2010

I guess now is as good a time as any to start writing this. I’m about to finish reading a translation of Stieg Larsson so not only do I have the time, but I have the edgy style of writing in my head, which I have subconciously started replicating in my head. In black and white it probably isn’t quite as impressive, but then again his writing is backed up by several incredibly intense stories, whereas I’m just dabbling in a bit of me and my surroundings.

I’m Bridg, 21 years old; born at around 2 in the morning late on in July of ’89. I was a week late and the third child my mum had had, as such she wasn’t anxiously awaiting me in hospital: she woke up to find me trying to escape around midnight and was driven by my dad the two hours to the hospital where I was born. She claims she had to cross her legs in the carpark to stop me slipping out.

Things have continued to be pretty interesting since then, in my opinion. I don’t particularly want to turn this into a biography so I’ll bring up relevant parts of my upbringing as they become relevant or if I run out of other things to write. At the moment key background info is that, following many complications at schools which couldn’t handle my hunger for knowledge, I became an award-winning student of French and German at the University of Otago. By award-winning, I don’t mean to say the whole world reveres me (I barely get any reverence from my own boyfriend!), I just mean people tend to give me money and trips. The trips are the relevant part. I have three sisters and we were brought up to be hard working all-rounders who are all in all quite likeable. As a result of this, I’m currently living with the boss of my summer job: travelling around the country selling whitebait at food festivals, A&P shows and the like. I think that brings us today, or rather last night, which is where my first story, in what I hope will be a collection of interesting/amusing anecdotes from my life, begins.

I’m up north on the coast, doing clean-up and other errands in preparation for the rest of the season of travel/work. For now, I think I’ll follow the trend from back in Kleist’s time where it was quite cool to only partially identify places by using the first letter of their name followed by dot dot dot. I do it for fear of stalkers/identification. People like Kleist did it because it was cool, and as writers they were the rockstars of their time. So anyhow, here in K… the population is less than 1000 and a large proportion of them are branded as hippies because that’s the closest thing to a stereotype you can give them. That or alternative. I’d just like to point out right now that I admire self-sufficient people and think they’re AOK. After spending a heck of a lot of time with just each other for company over the space of about a month, my boss and I were in need of a bit of outside company. I was, anyhow. He invited four friends over for a BBQ: two couples, who I expected to be around 50, like him, and generally old and a touch eccentric. I was concocting a plan of how to sneak away to avoid being bored to death when the first couple arrived. I was sunbathing at the time. This is how it played out.

Couple Number One and I had some awkward first moments when I walked out to meet them in my bikini. Would you call the female version of a toyboy a toygirl? I was reminded of jokes made between sisters about one day having a much-younger pool-boy to perve at. Mrs One quite blatantly looked me up and down and I rushed off to put some shorts on. Mrs One is a younger-than-expected artist with lots of tattoos and bad teeth, Mr One has slightly worse teeth and is a really nice guy who seems to have had his finger in every employment pie: working on ships, in the forest, and now presumably in K… They live in a one-room house built amongst the bush for them by the community who thought they’d lived in a tent for long enough. They know the boss through fishing and the community.

After whipping out some snacks and having a wee chat with Mr One (turns out he learned Russian on one of the ships he worked on. I was a bit too scared to talk to Mrs One after being very visually judged.), Couple Number Two arrived. Mrs Two looked like she should have been with Mr One: they both had soft, pale skin and seemed to be the “nice” half of their pair. Like Mrs One, Mr Two looked like a bit of a badass. I was on the net when he arrived and he called me a nerd. I said there are worse things I could be. Turns out he is, or used to be, a grower and consumer of pot. In fact, the whole lot of them seem to be stoner buddies, which is just fine by me – this eliminated my intial fear of a long, boring, stuffy, tedious night. Mrs Two was quite large and didn’t talk much. Mr Two had lots of cool and interesting stuff to say, but I prefered to go and play with their dog because I didn’t really understand their tales of fishing and forestry. Mrs One loves horses and is Dutch – my company is steadily getting more interesting – and Mr One is a complete gentleman, complementing my BBQ skills (then again I hid the fact that I splashed hot oil all over my arm. I have some nice dark blotches to show for it now.) and generally being a nice fella. Dinner is delicious, company amicable and eventually everyone heads home. I get an awkward side-hug from the boss (awkward on my part) before he heads off to bed.

I could write more and go into more detail, but I think a short summary is nice for now, perhaps if people become interested in what I have to say, I’ll say more. For the moment, writing screeds would somehow feel a bit arrogant so that’s all from me!

Until we meet again…

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