"Gimme my life back, you goddamn crack whore!"

The Amazing Two-Second Slinky Memory Game

Someone needs to save me from my hamster memory.

The other day, I was walking back to the office, daydreaming of nicotine, when this short, jacketed person who reminded me a little of a gerbil stopped me with that happy, open face that your friends have when they meet you unexpectedly on the street.

“Hiiii!” she said.

I had no clue who she was. “Um, hi…”

“How have you been?” she asked me excitedly.

“Good, good, and yourself?” I ask in return, my brain frantically scrambling to figure out who the hell this person was. I was quite sure that I had never seen her in my life, but she seemed to know me.

“I’m good, I’m good, I set up with a company, actually, we’ve got a group together. Where are you now?”

Odd, this person seemed to know that I had left The Firm. This, more than ever, convinced me that she belonged to the ever-growing category of people that I had met and promptly forgotten that I had. Not hard when you have a two-second memory. (Not my fault. My brain is taken up with very important things. Like chocolate and Zara sales.)

“Um, I work at the S___ T____ B____ now.”

“Ohhhh, that’s good, trader right?”

Okay, that really floored me. She showed every indication that she knew me but she thought I was a trader. But there were still niggling doubts in my head. I mean, who else looked like me and had mad hair like mine? It was just too insane to think that there was another Crazy Hair Slinky walking around out there. Who people trusted with shares.

So instead of telling her, “Um, I think you’ve made a mistake”, I said, “Yeah, well, you know….”

It got weirder.

She started telling me excitedly about how they were looking for good people in her company. She even gave me her card with her name on it. No bells rang. I was getting that thoroughly surreal feeling you sometimes get while watching bad French movies. I was beginning to figure out it was just a farcical case of mistaken identity, but I was too deep to get out now. After a bit, she looked sheepish, and said, “Hey, listen, this is embarrassing, but I’ve forgotten your name…”

Ahah! I thought. This is when she will realize that it was a silly mistake and we will laugh about it and walk away feeling really stupid.

I told her my name.

Not an eyeblink! Not a flinch! In fact, she looked a little pleased, like hearing my name and kickstarted her brain.

Then she said the kicker.

“Hey, we’re looking for good people. Can I call you?”

I figured that I was pretty much too deep in too back out now. “Suuuure," I said feebly, and gave her my number. I have no clue what I’ll say if she actually calls me.

I really have no clue who she thinks I am. I find myself curious to meet this other Crazy Hair Slinky Doppelganger who trades in stocks and shares. Maybe she is leading the life I always wanted to lead, with a huge house and a million dogs, and a Boy of her own who loves and adores the ground she walks on while still retaining his reformed-bad-boy air Maybe she got married in a Vera Wang wedding gown picked out in Swarovski crystals, and Manolos shod her feet. Maybe she lives in my little paradise which I want so much. In which case, I’d like to go right up to her and kick her.

Maybe she’s secretly a crack whore. One can only hope.

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Manolos summer version richter scale 9

A paper envelope was handed to me by my colleague the other day. It was headed “Money for tidal waves!” After a moment for my sleep-starved brain to ponder why we needed to fund tidal waves, I deciphered the grammatically -slaughtered sentence to mean that they were taking donations for the victims of the Indonesian earthquake disaster.

On the envelope were a few shaky columns for your name, and the amount that you had donated. No indication of who it was from, or where it was going to.

I emailed the colleague who had handed me the envelope, asking what charity or organization it was going to.

She didn’t know, but apparently it had come down from a corporate lawyer upstairs. She also said (in an endearingly defensive manner) that the only reason that she hadn’t given any money was because her wallet was empty.

This is very dodgy. Those Corporate people are definitely off their rockers. I don’t want my hard-earned cash to go towards financing some Corporate hussy’s Manolo fetish. I am personally against financing other people's shoe fetishes. I need all my cash for my own.

I later get an email from the boss of the firm that says that the Corporate lawyer is using the money to help ‘some orphanage’ in Sri Lanka which got hit by the tsunamis. He’s Corporate too. I think these Corporate people are in cahoots. They earn too much money.

(seriously though, they need help. Please do so anyway you can)

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Cinematic Cigarette Cockteases in D Minor

I have also discovered that nicotine withdrawal makes you crazy.

I have been jittery since Monday. By Friday, I was alternating between wow-look-at-all-of-the-sparkly-things!- hyper and grumpy. I walk into a cloud of someone else's second-hand smoke and unconsciously try to inhale it.

Last night I was out with Ego, and I distinctly remember yelling at the sky, “Stop RAINING on me!”

He gave a Look and said, “Yes, it was exclusive, wasn’t it.” Or something disparaging like that.

He always does that.

We went to watch The Sea Inside because I was feeling reasonably intelligent that day and my foreign-movie quota needed upping. I thought I would be safe from the evils of fagging, but noooooooo. (For those who don’t know, The Sea Inside is a truly heart wrenching movie about a paraplegic who wants to die by acclaimed Spanish director Alejandro Amenabar.) About forty minutes to an hour in, bloody Senor Amenabar decided it would be a good idea to turn the movie into a paen to the joys of smoking. Loving close-ups of smoldering cigarettes, looks of bliss after a breathy, almost sexual exhalation, deep, sensual drags between the main character and the lawyer who loves him, it was a nicotine cocktease all the way. The damn quadriplegic got to smoke more than me. After we came out of the movie, Ego told me that he could feel me yearn towards the screen every time the damn characters lit up. I was, of course, gagging for it by then.

Stupid Amenabar.

The Slinky Cat says movies should come with a health warning.