I’m Just Sayin: Dear Australia, I Apologise For Being A Bitch

I’m still not quite sure what exactly was going through my head when I somehow convinced myself that spending my 39th birthday in the land down under was the most brilliantly fabulous idea ever known to mankind. I guess like most of my other grandiose flashes of genius, everything always sound uber cool at three o’clock in the morning!

But ok to be fair with the Aussies, this was indeed a really really good idea – it’s just that as usual, it took me a minute to get it. I mean, seriously who in their right mind wouldn’t be thrilled to have the chance to voyage to Australia to blow some freaking candles on some fat ass cake?

Oh and did I mention that not only this was an opportunity for me to see Sydney but as well to be spending my birthday in the company of my two (out of three) brothers? So why am I complaining you may rightfully be asking yourselves?

Frankly besides the fact that I am certifiably a little high-maintenance spoiled diva and, hands down, a royal bitch (by nature), I have absolutely no clue why I was complaining about this trip before I had even left LA; nor do I understand why ever since I got to Sydney I have dedicatedly committed myself to not have a good time.

But to tell you the truth, I wasn’t even aware I was on bitch mode! Obviously my brother has been way too polite to say something. That of course was until I got to talk to my friend McKenzie on Skype. How should I say that? Well, she basically didn’t hesitate to call me on my shit!
“You’ve got some serious problems Mona”, she said rather alarmed.
“When you come back to LA I highly suggest you go see Bob – he’s an amazing therapist” she proceeded to say.

“Therapist” was without a doubt the operative word that immediately catapulted me back into reality.
“Not again!” I thought to myself. How much more work can any shrink realistically speaking do with me as the subject? For God’s sake, even my older brother who earned a master in Psychology early on gave up on me as a patient – I believe I qualify under the “lost cause” category. If at 39 years old they still haven’t figured it out than neither will I! The way I see it is that I’m not completely defective, I’m only slightly challenged with a benign psychological malfunction of some sort.

Oops, I’m totally digressing here. So let’s go back to my Australian escapade from where I am currently writing my column this week – I just had to say that to situate the action in time. It is safe to say that I never gave Sydney a chance! From the minute I boarded the plane, I had pretty much already made up my mind about hating Australia.
Of course, I can’t take full responsibility for my madness and have to blame this entire self-inflicted absurd indisposition on the little incident that occurred on the plane while still on the ground at LAX.

As if it wasn’t enough that I was already flipping out about the prospect of being stuck on a plane for fifteen long ass hours, with my luck, evidently, the flight got substantially delayed. Don’t get me wrong! I’m not afraid to fly. I’m just a claustrophobic maniac who tends to over-dramatically suffocate when trapped in one very confined space for too long; well that and the fact that I am an avid cigarette smoker and the thought of keeping my lungs nicotine free for 15 hours is simply hell – c’mon now, fifteen hours? That almost an whole fucking day!

So we were two hours behind schedule because of some technical difficulty on the ground – apparently some light was not flashing. How reassuring, right?
But that’s not what really bothered me. What really made me go beserkly insane was the fact that minutes before the plane finally took off, some bozo showed up out of nowhere to claim the seat next to me that had conveniently remained vacant until then. I couldn’t for the life of me comprehend where on earth was this guy coming from – especially considering the fact that the doors had been locked two hours ago. Seriously, where the hell had he been for the past 120 minutes? He couldn’t possibly have been on a bathroom break as long as this – surely security would have been on his ass by now! No…this guy popped out of somewhere else as in another seat located somewhere else on that damned plane – a seat he obviously deemed not good enough for him. No matter how I tried to rationalize it, I just couldn’t digest the fact that his new found comfort was going to cause my own discomfort.
That’s when I made the prompt executive decision to switch to full bitch mode.

“This is not your seat”, I said in menacing tone.
“Yes it is,” he answered
“No it’s not,” I replied and immediately followed with “show me your boarding pass” – as if I had some sort of legal authority to demand to see his traveling documents.
“I get it” as proceeded to say in a very matter of fact manner, “you’re actually sitting somewhere else but then decided to move here because you find this seat better.”
“Yes, so what?” he finally confessed.
So what? How about the fact that his move was detrimental to my comfort? Seriously, that guy had some nerves! How selfish of him to inconvenience me that way? I don’t see why I should suffer the consequence of his bad judgment in selecting his original seat. Let’ cut to the chase and bottom line this: the fact was that the seat number on his boarding pass did not match the seat his ass was now resting on –end of freaking story! Victory shall be mine and rightfully so it was. Clearly unable to make a legitimate rebuttal against my very convincing case, Bozo eventually capitulated and returned to his originally assigned seat.

As for moi, well I did find peace of mind and an extra piece of chair but not so much the comfort I was anticipating. Note to self: two seats are not big enough to serve in lieu of a bed. In the end all I gained was a pain in the ass – literally and figuratively speaking!

So I didn’t get to Sydney in the best physical condition and mental state of mind possible. Yet in my defense, all of this “I can’t get no satisfaction” guerrilla PR campaign was enfolding in the very unconscious part of my dementedly twisted brain –which in plain English means it wasn’t real!

Suffice to say that from the moment the plane touched the Australian soil to the McKenzie wake up call – approximately a total of 4 days – I spent my time rigorously doing one thing: bitch, bitch, bitch, bitch and BITCH!

As a matter of fact, I’ve bitched, complained, judged, criticized, commiserated and whined so excessively well that I think I might have possibly exceeded the threshold of what qualifies as humanly feasible. Again, why my brother hasn’t put my ass back on the first plane to LA yet is beyond my comprehension. But this is not about him, it’s about me!

Now I can see the frowns on your faces as you’re silently wondering: “what was I bitching about?”
Perhaps it would be easier to ask what was I not bitching about? Try everything!
You name it and I bitched about it. How about the fact that they drive on the wrong side of the road and that every time I cross the freaking street I almost become another Australian statistic – as in another one of those foreigners who get run over by an automobile for failing to look on the right side of the street first; or how about the fact that Bell Peppers (a food I am mortally allergic to) does not exist in the Australian vocabulary or rather inexplicably translates into “capsicum”, and had I not had the clairvoyance to smell my dish I would have made a pronto trip to the ER; Oh and what about the fact that until now I was royally duped into believing that the majority of the Aussie population was gay because they all kept on referring to their significant other as their “partner” – of course only to find out a minute ago courtesy of my bro, that “partner” is the customary English expression for that “special someone” in your life, gay or straight or bi or whatever. I’m not even going to mention how I have been busting my brother’s balls to produce a real life Kangaroo in front of me – because, surely they all casually hang out at the local coffee joint around the corner. For Christ’s sake! I’m not an uneducated moron to be so rudimentary in my thinking! Of course I know better than to reduce Australia down to a stereotypical caricature. Did I really think a city as cosmopolitan as Sydney would be all Crocodile Dundee-like, and that all I would be carbureting on vegemite sandwiches during my entire stay?

Hello Mona!!! Please wake up and smell the Gloria Jane Coffee (that would be the equivalent of Starbucks). I’m in freaking AUSTRALIA as in The Bee Gees, Olivia Newton John, Kylie Minogue, Hugh Jackmam and Nicole Kidman! What the fuck is so terribly wrong about Sydney?

Well thanks to McKenzie what I finally realized is that in the land down under, while they do a lot of things in reverse, the other way around and/or overall simply differently, the only thing that is really upside down Down Under is me!

To my poor brother, all I can say is that I am deeply, truly, sincerely and honeslty sorry for being such an asshole …

PS: I love you very beaucoup, no will you please please please still take me to the zoo to see my god damned real life freaking Kangaroo!