THE TRIPLE-SIDED COIN

Today was one of those 'what the f@#* have I done?' days.

Fresh in my mind were email reports from the team of Friday afternoon Bollinger and glowing reviews of my old show (you know, Michelle Crowther's conversation hour... .with Richard Fidler) from the nation's movers and shakers... upcoming work trips to Sydney.

At this end I have a limited social life and fast-dwindling resources... and have just discovered the difference between speaking Spanish, and speaking Spanish.

Well, I guess going from communicating for a living, to just living ..for.. to.. comunicate (gracelessly, with little brainpower left for anything else) was always going to be... um, depressing.

Parties, that's the kicker. When everyone standing around you is laughing at a joke you didn't even know had been made... what with the background noise, music.. slang. Do you know that not having access to everything you want to say completely changes your personality? I notice people really en-unc-iat-ing and then looking over my shoulder. Awful.

Went to a party at 2am the other night, wall-to-wall with Mexico's beautiful, TALL men. I have been wondering where they were. Virtually no women. Sounds like a dream, hey?

Gay, all of them. Gay and straight don't seem to mix here, I think it's a macho thing.

Anyone who wanted to write a thesis suggesting gay is actually a higher level of human evolution would be best off coming here (if the premise was that higher evolution is measured by beauty, income, habitation and dress sense).

I was sniffed out by the only straight man in the place, turns out his presence was only due to the perils of party-crashing... he'd bluffed his way though the security doors and was nose-to-shoulder with the Latino love gods before he realised.

So he grabbed one of the only three women there. Needless to say, I'm flattered.

We went dancing at midnight a few days later, but Ara says I can never go out with him again because he didn't pay the whole bill. It seems that that's the upside of living in a macho culture - if a guy wants to do you, he has to buy the food/drinks. I am not sure whether to operate within the laws of the country of habitation... or capitalise on the gains made by feminism and assert my right to go broke even more quickly.

I am starting to wonder about Ara's bill-paying theory though, because I have a hundred percent hit-rate of men-who-split-the-bill. Two out of two is bad, thankyou Meatloaf.

As for where the beautiful men are the rest of the time... they seem to be at the gym (which I have joined)(no causal link). The gym doctor - that's right, you read correctly, we're talking about the sort of gym fees that could fund your child's education - has informed me I have to lose 3.6 kilos in order to be 'perfecto'. I didn't have the heart to tell him it'd all come off my 'boobies' and not my 'cadera'... and therefore 'perfecto' would just be 'pera' (pear-shaped)

So, it looks like at the end of this whole saga I may just end up skinny (gym + no money to buy food - social life, drinking etc) and bi-lingual.

ps. given that Britney Spears is the most searched person on the internet, if I put the words 'Britney Spears' and 'Vagina' in my blog... does that make it more accessible in google? Ssomething about the more hits/keywords... it's a complex algorithm I don't have time to explain - as I would have to google it first, in order to do so.