Sex, Drugs and Thai Green Curry

Recently, I have been in incredibly good spirits. This might not seem like such a big deal to those of you who don’t know me so well, or haven’t been around me a lot lately, but believe me, it’s a huge deal.

I am currently working as an English teacher, and all week long I am around small screaming children who, it is true, are sometimes really sweet and they make me smile a lot, but sometimes they get under my skin like you wouldn’t believe.

I have a boss who I don’t get along with at all. In fact, “don’t get along with" is a huge improvement on the truth of the matter.

Until just a short while ago, I was feeling sad, angry, depressed, irate and unmotivated. But the thing is, work-wise, there’s not a whole lot that’s changed. I still teach screaming children, and I still want to stick an unsterilized needle into my boss’s eye. So why do I suddenly feel surprisingly light hearted?

One cause, I believe, is the drugs that are being pumped through my air conditioning and my water supply. All the time I am sitting in my apartment watching a movie, or writing articles for myspace, or doing whatever else it is that seems to make time pass so quickly, I am actually inhaling drugs, in the form of smoke, that my neighbors or possibly Janakan has been feeding through my air con vent.

You think I’m joking. I’m actually incredibly serious. If you ask Jackie, who helped me to move into my apartment in December last year, she will confirm that we found quite a lot of atypical paraphernalia scattered around the apartment, some of which puzzled us enormously – basket upon basket of fishing wire, hundreds of Hello Kitty fridge magnets and several little plastic action figures littering the window sills were the least of my worries. It was when I started unearthing things like sterilized glasses in the freezer containing long-frozen powder and plastic hospital gloves, a chiller drawer packed with various suspicious-looking herbs and other such concoctions, and metal trays that looked like they belonged in a meth lab that I started to really worry. Not to mention the mini-shrine in the kitchen and the little slips of paper which I later discovered to be the Chinese form of exorcism.

So you see, suspecting that my apartment is being supplied with “smoke satiated drugs”, as Janakan sagaciously put it, might not be as far from the truth as some of you may have previously believed.

Of course, it could be something a lot more customary that has put the smile back onto my face. Meeting with people my age group on Wednesday evenings, spending Sunday afternoons playing Mafia and other such entertaining games, and being around more good-looking and intelligent people than I’ve been around in a while could all be playing a huge part in my existing state of bliss. It could also be that my beautiful and charming friend has offered to come around tomorrow and cook Thai green curry, one of my favorite dishes in the world; needless to say, I’m exceedingly excited to sample his cooking.

Now, if any of you read Janakan’s space, you’ll know that he suspects that my present delight at life is to do with the possibility of me falling in love, or enjoying “threesomes with inanimate objects such as (my) bed and mattress*”. I neither confirm nor deny either of these allegations, but I do encourage you to post a comment and let me know what your opinions are on why Hayley has been feeling on top of the world lately.



*"JAN i was cleaning my apartment today and i ended up sandwiched between my mattress and my actual bed. i was trying to move it around and i took the mattress off and propped it against the wall and then i bent over to lift my bed so i could sweep underneath, and i must have nudged the mattress behind me or something with my foot because it cascaded down on top of me and i was squashed. including the time i just lied there laughing, it took me about 6 minutes to get out. do you realise how much money i could earn if i had caught that on video??"

The Great Search: Hong Kong's Most Eligible Bachelor

Hey everybody! Okay, so they say there are plenty of fish in the sea, but as my good and very intelligent friend Stephanie Manson pointed out to me a couple of weeks ago, the ocean tends to be very, very polluted and nobody ever mentions THAT to you, do they. So here it is - a record of my findings as I have attempted to seek out HK's most eligible bachelor.

I feel I should explain a little what this is all about. Basically, it's just me being sick to death of meeting guys who make you think they're fabulous and then revealing a month or two down the line that they're really not. Since summer 2006 this has happened to me… 4 times. Each male has either turned out to be emotionally unavailable, harboring rather deeply disturbing skeletons in their closets, or a chauvinistic moron. Since I seem to have such bad luck with the male species, I've decided to make light of it and turn it about into a bit of a laugh for everybody to enjoy. Plus, this way everybody can read it and I don't have to repeat my in-depth and sometimes startlingly mundane stories four or five times a day in order for my friends to keep up to date on my current relationship (or lack of) status.

Everybody these days seems to go about meeting new guys by going partying, drinking, clubbing, and picking lots of guys up, hooking up with them, giving them your number and then never hearing from them again. I've tried and tested that method and I came to the conclusion that it SUCKS, it doesn't work, so I moved onto other methods. If I was looking for a one-night stand with a member of the HK rugby team, a bar or club might be an excellent setting to do it in. Similarly, if my search was called the, I don't know, say, "Search for HK's SEEMINGLY Most Eligible Bachelor Who Actually Already Has Children To Another Woman", this might be a good way to go about it. But who wants that? SO.

First of all, I logged onto myspace.com and, just for laughs, ran a search for single men in Hong Kong between the ages of 19 and 25, looking to date women. It came up with hundreds of options. 479 to be exact. And so, faithful that I am, I went through each and every one, looking for one that might be somewhat dateable – to no avail, evidently, because I'm still single and have no dates set up between now and forever. There were short men, tall men, fat men, skinny men and muscular men. Chinese men, Korean men, Japanese, Black and Caucasian. Butchers, bakers, candle-stick makers, literally crowds of men. I also came across a couple of 13 year old girls that had put that they were 23 year old males looking for women to date, I assume just for gags, otherwise they have some serious complexes they need to see a therapist about, sharp-ish. But my soulmate, people, is still nowhere to be found. Oh well, better luck next time.

I came across a new website shortly after that, a link that a long-lost friend had sent me – friendfinder.com. Worth a try, thought I, so I filled in all the necessary information, plus answering some additional questions that I did wonder about – my bra size, for one. I submitted my form, uploaded a picture, and waited. Within three minutes I had received two invitations to join a married couple and a lesbian couple for sex, and only then did I realize I had not joined the clean friendfinder.com – the website I had somehow been redirected to was adultfriendfinder.com. Links to various porn sites are still popping up sporadically all over my screen. Conundrum!

Needless to say, I ended my search there for the day. Call me weak, I just felt I couldn't deal with any more penis appearing on my screen. So, I will continue my search if and when I get some time and I will keep you all posted, mostly because it's a therapeutical outlet for me if I'm honest :).