vhy are ve vearing vetsuits?

Connie left yesterday. We spent much of the last day speaking with fake German accents, which really just meant repeating the phrase "Vhy are ve vearing vetsuits?" a thousand times and saying, "Oh, vatch out!" when crossing the street. We told each other's fortunes by directing each other to point to random sections of the Gideon Bible in our hotel room. Mine was Deuteronomy 11:30: "Are they not on the other side of the Jordan, toward the setting sun, in the land of the Canaanites who dwell in the plain opposite Gigal, besides the Terebinith trees of Morah?" (Awesome that my fortune is to be in Lord of the Rings!!) Everywhere we went, we declared ourselves co-queens of the place. I flexed in front of a mirror wearing no pants and told Connie I had the body of a Greek god, an Adonis, a Roman god, a Roman soldier, and that I had the kind of physique that would have been killed by a spear, and Connie turned away from me and said that she wouldn't dignify my behavior with an audience. I was whining on about being tired and Connie said suddenly, "I am awesome! God! I'm awesome." She had been ignoring me completely and had just finished threading a string through the hood of her hoodie. Connie also recalled the entire plot of the Twilight series to me over the course of ninety minutes, sparing few details. Renesmee? Really, Stephanie Meyer?

In Connie's last ninety minutes in Sydney, we sat down at the bar on the harbor next to the Opera House and drank three champagnes and three beers and attempted to write a journal entry together. Then we staggered through Hyde Park and videotaped ourselves singing and dancing along to the chorus of Rihanna's "S.O.S.", which Connie had been steadily choreographing ever since we arrived in Australia. Connie split her pants open on "It's not healthy for me to feel this way." There was an 18" tear down the ass seam of her beloved gray jeans but it was worth it for the awesomeness. I am alone in Sydney for five days and missing the split pants off of Connie.

This is the journal entry we wrote together. The subjectivity keeps changing because Connie and I alternated writing it:

Things we have done since Melbourne

We had a day of travel from Melbourne to Cairns. We stayed in one hostel in Cairns for four days, the Tropic Days. There was a bulldog that looked like a wombat. Charges were applied for every amenity, including air conditioning by the hour. There was a horrible mean bitch woman who was really condescending to us and a Dutch woman. Our first night in Cairns we went to a place called Bull Bar for beer and food and a terribly loud drunk Australian band, and then Woolshed. About Woolshed, Lonely Planet wrote, “If you can’t get laid in Woolshed, you will probably never get laid.” The LP also described the Sydney Harbour (sp?) Bridge as a coathanger that might give you a spook. We both thought this was stupid. Today, Wednesday September 23, 2009 is Connie’s last day in Australia. It is making me very sad. We went to the Australian museum in the morning and then went looking for donuts that gave me instant diarrhea. “Dude, non-white kids are so cute,” Connie has just said. The museum was interesting. People’s sisters (like Kylie Minogue’s sister and Nicole Kidman’s sister) are stars here because there are only 20 million people in the country. We own this country. The animals in this country are insane because they shit in cubes like the wombat. We started saying “suck my dick” to each other and then gesturing lewdly toward our crotches. We bought kangaroo boxing pens and made them box. Also, Connie will announce to her stepmom, “I love you” using the kangaroo boxer to emphasize words.

Yesterday we walked very slowly to the Opera House. Then we walked very slowly to the Museum of Contemporary Art. Then we went on a ferry. Then monorail. Then Japanese noodles at ichiban because Jimmy’s Malaysian was closed.

Over dinner, Connie posed a series of horrible hypothetical questions to me, such as “Would you rather give up rice or wheat?” and “Would you rather give up rice-based foods or all foods shaped like noodles?” Then we went to Kinokuniya, which is a huge bookstore with lots of Asian language books. I bought a music box for Raj. Then we hid from a thunderstorm and attempted to find Starbucks. Although we might have been directed to “Star Bar,” by the fobby people we asked, there was actually a Starbucks across the street from "Star Bar." Then we journaled separately for an hour. Then we walked very slowly back to the hotel, where Connie fell asleep and I went to an internet café to research lesbian bar options. Connie and I are lesbifriends. We say to each other, “We are lesbifriends,” and, "Hey, les be friends, okay?" Sonia was online and we chatted for half an hour, which put me in a state of bliss.

Mandy hates Germans. She is very good at a French accent. “JJ, ni zai na li?” It’s really cool that Sydneysiders hang out everywhere outdoors, including right in front of the Opera House. We devised a system for crossing the street where we look on our side and say “clear.” Some times we have said “Woah, NOT clear!” But generally we are co-queens of this country. When one of us says “This country sucks” we mean that we are hungry. Then we find food immediately and one of us says, “I guess this place is pretty cool, huh?” I start work in 5 days!

Our last day in Cairns we got $.50 cones from McDonalds. We had an enjoyable lay in the shade until Connie screamed because there was an ant on her arm. We recreated photos from Connie’s lost camera in the Thai restaurant where we ate lunch, including Connie snorkeling and me eating the king-sized Twix bar. Yesterday I took off my shirt on the monorail because from one stop to the next nobody was riding in the car. Anyway back in Cairns, all we did was shuffle from spot to spot. We went to a mall where the teens go, and then the Green Ant Cantina where we were the only customers but the cashier still insisted that we take that little number clamped to a stand that Australians use in lieu of waiters. We had a kangaroo burger and prawn fajitas and then dashed to the hostel.

Mandy has been talking to me about Sonia nonstop but I ignore her. Mandy jumped off the pier at Fitzroy Island and looked like an uncoordinated orangutan. Right now I am drinking Opera House Brut and Mands is drinking Bees Knees (or whatever it’s called). It was 30 degrees yesterday and today it’s about 22. We’ve been using my calculator watch to figure out the conversion. We are both extremely scared of the sun right now. There are tons of Asian people here. We decided that pandas are a zillion times better than koalas. MASTER RACE BITCHES! This country is a poor imitation of others.

Today because we were so scared of the sun, I wore a surgeon’s mask and sunglasses and pulled up my hood, and Connie wore my bandana tied around her face and sunglasses and pulled up her hood, and then we walked around Sydney with our coats zipped up. We looked like Unabombers. Connie told me a story about her high school friend who aspirated his Hs and chose “Hwhat?!” as his tagline his yearbook, but the yearbook editors thought it was a typo so his high school yearbook quote is just “What.” And then she told me a story about Sarah freaking out about seeing two of the same pair of earmuffs. I tried on a sarong dress and Constance cut off the top of my head in the picture she was taking because she was laughing so hard. The man at the New South Wales state parliament building started singing the Star Spangled Banner when I said I was American, and his friend called him an idiot. Sometimes state parliamentarians wear wigs but not much any more. Connie says I smile all blissed out when reading emails from Sonia, and I say that she gets that way when thinking about Vanilla Coke. Connie first didn’t want any of my Vanilla Coke, but when I said, “Mm, this Vanilla Coke is delicious!” she thought for a moment, and then said, “Okay, give me a sip.” Connie is very responsive to advertising.

Everything is a lawsuit in this country. A rat can bite people through a gap in the display case, and there’s just a little sticker that says “Rat will bite!” Also on the Opera House steps children can climb on the side of the steps and fall to their death. Mandy LOVED the Great Barrier Reef. She was waving her arms around and looked like a kid in the biggest candy store in the world in the middle of Disneyland. Mandy thinks that doing the Australian accent just requires sticking out her front teeth farther but she is dead wrong. We keep saying “Yah, yah” which is a line from Blood Diamond. In Cairns, Koaland was our North Star. Mandy has been washing her hair with dish soap.

I washed my hair with Connie’s shampoo and conditioner yesterday and today she has marveled at the quality of my hair. “You have really nice hair!” she keeps saying, as if surprised. She said I could be a Pantene Pro V model, with a before and after. “I used to wash my hair with dish soap!” she says, modeling the commercial that I would star in. Connie and I have been calling each other “Stupid!” and “Idiot!” and saying “Shut up!” to each other, but in a loving affectionate way. She made me take the love language quizzes in the Cairns hostel except I didn’t get reception in our stupid German-voice-capturing room so I had to hold the laptop up over my head near the window and take the quiz. The quiz’s questions are impossible to answer, because they’re like, “Would you rather breathe air, or drink water?” Connie accused me of not taking it seriously. In the end our love language needs are the same except Connie values physical touch more and I value emails from Sonia more.

It’s three drinks later! Yeah, bitches! Partytime! Whoo hoo! Suck my dick! (Just kidding.) Mandy went to the bathroom. Now she’s coming back.

Constance says, “When I get excited, I produce a lot of saliva.” This is why when we stood at the front of the boat back from the Great Barrier Reef for ninety minutes trying to balance while doing the Muppet dance, she said “This is so pppfffun!!!” and spat all over me. When she got on the ocean trampoline, she screamed, “This is so much fun!!!!!” involuntarily and made the people around us laugh. Bazz the kayak guide who might have stolen Connie’s camera said the water I was jumping off the pier into was “deep enough” and then threw in a half chewed pizza crust, saying, “Here, let’s attract some fish first.”