go get em' frankie! - on the perks of living alone.

"I grew up with six brothers. That's how I learned to dance -

waiting for the bathroom."

- Bob Hope

You know, Frankie was on to something with the whole “My Way” thing. I mean sharing is caring and all…but “my friend, I’ll say it clear, I’ll state my case, of which I’m certain…” and my case, is that I’m done with that. Done. With. That. I have, as I’m sure most people have, lived with parents, grandparents, other family members, total strangers, boyfriends, friends, flatmates, flatmates who weren’t friends, flatmates who became friends, flatmates who became more than friends, flatmates who became more than friends and then became less than friends, way way less than…you get the drift. And for the first time in a long time, I finally live alone. And I absolutely love it. Sure, there’ll probably come a day when I slip and fall in the shower and will need someone to help me up, a lightbulb that will need changing, or a day when I’ll just get plain lonely…but we’ll cross, (or jump off) that bridge when we get to it. And by “we” I of course mean “me.” Right now however, all “we” can see are the perks. And boy are there many…

1. You can live on chicken caesar salad everyday…and you, in true Caesarian fashion, get to decide when you’re bored of that. And, truth be told, I just don’t think that’s ever going to happen.

2. You never have to worry about having the last one of anything. “No you have it.” “No you have it.” None o’ that.

3. You can open things with things you’re not supposed to open things with. Like butter knives and teeth. And nobody’s going to tell you not to.

4. And after you’ve opened the jar with a butter knife, you can stand over the kitchen counter and eat all the stuffed green olives in it. And be completely satisfied with that as dinner.

5. Or be completely satisfied with just cigarettes. Yum! (No, mom, I don’t really just have cigarettes for dinner, stop worrying).

6. You can smoke in bed. (I don’t do that either, but I like knowing that I can). And I’m sure that if and when that “right” moment comes along…I most certainly will thank you very much.

7. And speaking of “right” moments, and wrong moments…you can bend over to put dishes in the dishwasher, or to do your hand-washing in the bathtub without worryi—no, never mind, scratch that. TMI.

8. Nobody is going to “accidentally” wash your cashmere, or silk, or wool, or lingerie with the linens on 90, in the name of “doing you a favor.” You what, you didn’t know? No sweetheart, you didn’t think.

9. You can laugh out loud over something you read on your computer and you don’t have to explain to anyone what it is you’re laughing over. (Like your own jokes for instance. It totally works to laugh at your own jokes when you're on your own. What's more, you kind of have to. Otherwise nobody will).

10. In fact you can spend long hours in front of your computer facebooking, skypeing, googling, wikipediaing, or you-tubing, without being questioned on whether that is a legitimate use of your time or intelligence. Yesterday I spent a good hour reading up on St. Pancras and the pancreas. This is because last week, when I went to King’s Cross, the tube conductor said over the loudspeaker, “this is King’s Cross St. Pancreas.” Not PANCRAS, PANCREAS. I swear that’s what he said. And this got me thinking, are the two related? So I googled it. One’s a saint (or train station named after a saint, if you will), the other, a gland. Ipso facto, not related. That’s what I thought. Also, I randomly came across a video of a one-legged salsa dancer. Again, totally unrelated. But totally awesome. Check it out:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnsz8Uc3enE&feature=related

(PS. I love how the last word in that link is…RELATED! Maybe it all is, somehow…Google?)

11. The toothpaste always has the cap on. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not exactly the saint-of-all-things-closed—I leave drawers and stuff open all the time—but the toothpaste? Toothpaste is just one of those things you have to close.

12. Everything is Always. Exactly. Where. You. Left. It.

13. You can file, buff, and paint your nails whenever and wherever without worrying about the sound or the smell bothering anyone. And without getting a lecture on the coffee table varnish. Sorry dad. I promise. I won’t do it again. (But my nails are gorgeous, thanks for asking!)

14. Nobody’s going to judge you for buying the expensive toilet paper. (There should probably be another sorry dad somewhere in here). The thick fluffy one with snowflakes on it and adorable puppies on the label. Love that stuff. Correction, my tush loves that stuff. Doesn’t yours?

15. When you forget to get the (fancy) toilet paper out of the shopping bag you’ve just brought home…you can hop out of the bathroom with your knickers round your ankles and get it. Oh come on, we’ve all done it. (And if you haven’t, then you should probably try the fancy toilet paper. That stuff is worth the hop).

16. You can pee with the bathroom door open. I don’t know why I like this so much, but I do. It feels very Louis XIV…l’âge d’or, or something. Incidentally, in his time, he was one of the few (or only) people who actually had their own bathroom. But knowing him, he probably just ordered everyone to piss off (pun intended!) and left the door open anyhow. (And just to give credit where its due, I’m sure it was so much more than a door—the entrance to Louis’s bathroom quite possibly closely resembled the gates of heaven).

17. The toilet seat is always down. Down and clean. I just don’t get how they manage to spray it everywhere in the first place. You have a pointer for crying out loud! What do I got? (Not you, Louis, I’m sure you had control down, even in that department).

18. It seems a lot of the perks of living alone revolve around peeing. What can I say? I drink a lot of water. And a lot of coffee. A lot a lot.

19. Which reminds me—no one is going to count the number of cups of coffee you drink. Ahhh…encore garçon encore! Wait, there’s no garçon. But that would be nice, no? A little butler boy? Do a little dance, make a little love…roast a little chicken?

20. Ok. Focus. I’m focusing. Back to quantities—nobody is going to question whether you really need all those pairs of shoes. Need? When did that become the categorical imperative? You don’t really need that attitude, but you have it don’t you? And boy do you wear it well. (See now my butler boy, he wouldn’t have an attitude…)

21. As for “wearing:” you can take as long as you want to get ready…and actually, when there’s no one else around…turns out it doesn’t take that long at all.

22. I’d like to say you can walk around naked all the time…but I have big windows and a lot of them, so, that doesn’t really work. Yep. I learned that the hard way. Tweet Twee-eet. I suppose I could crawl around naked though. I should give that a go…

23. But speaking of crawling, this is a big one: You never ever have to tip-toe. I did ballet for almost ten years so I think its fair to say that I’m done with the whole tip-toe business.

24. Which sets us up for the coup de grace. You can be sure that when your Sunday Times is delivered early on Sunday morning you won’t wake anyone up when you pop down to get it…

25.…And most, most, most importantly: nobody will touch it before you. Jeremy Clarkson and I…All alone………

Now, tell me, what could be better than that.

MaID in Zambia.

I think my first roommate in college suffered as much of a culture shock from rooming with me as I did moving to New York. On what must have been my second or third Monday there, having had a good few weeks to suss each others patterns out, she asked me, “Dude, why the hell do you get up before class on Monday to do your laundry and then leave it all in that neat, ironed, folded, colour-coordinated pile on your perfectly made bed, and why on earth do you make your bed everyday?”

“Well, “ I began, “I do my laundry early on Monday mornings because that’s the only time there is no one else in the laundry room and I can use all the machines….”

“Erm,” she interrupted, “why do you need all the machines?”

Was this a trick question? “So I can do one white load, one dark, and one colour…?”

“You do realize that costs you three times more than just putting it all into one machine, don’t you?”

“Yes, dear, I can do the math, but a new white Ralph Lauren shirt would cost me a lot more than a few quarters if I had to replace the one that the mixed load had tinted pink.” She stared at me with a blank face. So I continued with my explanation, “…and I make my bed everyday and put the laundry on it in that pile because at home my maid did that for me every day, and I’m just used to having it like that. I couldn’t bear to come home to an unmade bed. And seeing as she’s not here to do it for me, I do it.”

“Dude. You have a maid?!”

Yes dude. “Two, actually.”

“Woooooah.” That was the end of that conversation and more or less the end of my making any new friends. News travelled pretty quickly and from that day onward I became known as the rich, snobby, stuck-up Zambian princess….so much so, that a few years later, somebody randomly walked up to me on campus and said, “Sorry to ask you this, but are you, like, really, like, the princess of Zambia (like)?” Erm, no. Dufus.

I spent a lot of time at college trying to justify, explain or just understand where I came from. It’s quite normal to have a maid in Zambia—I don’t know anyone who doesn’t. And I’m not talking about a Pole or Puertoriqueña who comes in once a week for three hours to do a mediocre sweep-mop-flush of a job that will earn her £40, as we have in London. I mean full-time, seven days a week, hands’n’knees scrubbing, ironing and chopping vegetables maid. And they probably get paid about as much as a Polish maid in London could make in a day—monthly! Its normal. But try explaining that to a bunch of ultra-left-wing, pot-smoking, ‘we-are-the-people’ people who don’t even drink Starbucks coffee because, oh lord knows why, somebody somewhere in the coffee picking labour chain didn’t get enough pats on the back. It took me a long time to understand, and then to accept, that things were relative…a long time to earn a measure of perspective. And perhaps all too ironically, I have two people to thank for that—my maids. For just as my roommate had her “Dude!” moments on that side of the ocean, my maids have their own almost everyday on the other side.

One day, having found me in my room when she came in to put that neatly stacked pile of laundry on my bed, she carefully picked out a piece of my underwear, held it up under the light like a lab specimen of guinness-book-worth-curiosity and said, “Madam, what is this?” Uh-oh. The word “thong” was too generous a title for the item she had in her hand, even “g-string” bordered on the euphemistic, that little number was just a string.

“Its underwear Agnes…panties,” I responded, knowing exactly what was coming next.

“But how do you wear this?” she said turning it around like it was a Rubik’s cube. Fearing that any attempt at explanation would only further entangle her confusion, I just put it on over my clothes and in a ta-da! tone said, “Like this!” Noticing the even more bemused look on her face, I glanced down just to make sure I had put it on right (you never know), which I had, but I suddenly realized what her next question was going to be for in that moment it formed in my mind too. “What the bloody hell is the point of that!?” To put a simple end to the conversation, I just said, “well when you wear underwear like this under trousers or a skirt then you don’t see the lines from the underwear.” To which she only had one response:

“Crazy mzungus.” (Crazy white people). I don’t think I’ve worn a g-string since. I either go seamless or commando, but I’d hang myself on that string before I ever put it in between my bum-cheeks again. Thank heavens. And Agnes.

Pelina, the other maid, who works mostly in the kitchen and is spared from the quantum physics of figuring out crazy white people’s laundry, has a whole different set of questions. Upon noticing a photograph of a sculpture from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York one afternoon, she said, “Madam, what’s this?” with a rather cheeky grin.

“A sculpture,” I responded, not quite getting the joke, adding, “you know, like the independence sculpture in front of the supreme court?” to give her a local point of reference.

“Ahhh, yes! Like a piece of art?”

“Exactly!” I exclaimed, rather impressed, and thinking the Q&A duly accomplished.

“But, eh, Madam…” she then pressed, as the cheeky grin turned into a light giggle, “why is it naked?” I couldn’t help but laugh. We sweetly laughed together like schoolchildren who had just encountered a pair of older students kissing in the playground. Though I am still searching for a way to answer this one…

A few days later, watching me as I put my hand in and out of a duck’s bum filling it with stuffing, she said, “Madam, are those your nails?”

“Yes,” I said, holding them up so that we could both admire my recently painted French manicure. She took one of them in her hand, and touched it with the wondrous gaze of a toddler fondling his mother’s colossal fingers for the first time.

“Sure, madam?” she asked again, in disbelief, “with this white tip?”

“Yes, Pelina, they are mine, but they are painted to look like this. Why, you don’t believe me?”

“No, madam, it’s just that us we buy nails like this from the market. Exactly the same.” So, its not only mzungus who are crazy. (Stuffing duck is an altogether different matter).

And the latest…my all-time favourite moment of perspective enlightening: Having put my iPhone down on the table as I reached to get something from the fridge, she looked at it in awe, and said, “Ahhhh, Blackberrrrrry,” with an enunciation that so piercingly revealed her pride in knowing its name. “iPhone” I gently corrected her. “Its your phone?” Erm, yes. It is indeed.

But as I walked away, I was suddenly reminded of those first few weeks at college again…when amongst millions of other things, I discovered that everyone, everyone, had an iPod. “Your whaaaaaaaaat?!” If only I could respond to that now! Whatever dude, yourPod, iPerspective.