Bloody Brazilians

I've hinted before about the Brazilian love-gone-wrong saga. Let's pretend you bought me those Bulmers and now I'm all chatty...

In a nutshell met a Brazilian bloke in Portugal when I was there in Feb 2005. We chatted all night, made out, exhanged phone numbers, I thought that was it. No - he txtd me and kept going on about how he'd never met a girl like me before and hoped I would come back to Lagos soon. Given he looked like this:

And Lagos looks like this:

and RyanAir would fly me there for 20 quid, well, I went back for another week.

That week turned into a month. I left to do some more travelling with my old flatmate from Dublin, Swedish Rebecca, and meet up with my beautiful friend Gosia in Prague, but he wanted me to come back again and so proposed over the phone. After a week or so I said yes, moved back to Lagos that May and we lived together for a year. My folks came to visit, loved Marcio, and we applied for his visa for Australia and planned our wedding for August 2006. He went home to Brazil at Christmas, I went to visit friends in the UK as we couldn't afford for us both to fly to Brazil. Anyways, after a year of essentially being a housewife I was officially going doolally, and said I wanted to head home to Oz, get a job and set up house and plan our wedding. He agreed, and I left Portugal in April 2006. Found a wedding dress in London on the way home to Melbourne, bought it. THREE HOURS after I bought the dress and was feeling all happy and in love, I got a call from Marcio to say I probably shouldn't have just bought that wedding dress as he was no longer coming to Australia - he'd had a one night stand when he was home in Brazil and the girl had just shown up at his Mum's place claiming to be pregnant with his baby. Can you imagine how delighted I was? Went through a few months of hell going back and forth about reconciling but in the end he chickened out and went home to Brazil, where he's now living with the 19-year-old slapper he'd got off with and the baby that was born waaaay to early to be his! Fun tale, donchya think? One for the grandkids, for sure.

I'm now as over it as you can be with these things, permanent scars to the heart and all that. I am, however, grateful I found out about his inability to keep his dick in his pants before we got married and had the babies he was forever nagging me to make with him. I've picked up the pieces and am happily getting on with my life: great job, new place, amazing friends and life here in Oz. However, there is still residual resenment towards Brazil and one Brazilian in particular, hence me fugging this couch:

It's of Brazilian design and leather. And it's fugly.

And you didn't even have to cough up for those Bulmers!

The tag stops here...

My mate Chris tagged me to do a meme. Here are the rules:

We have to post these rules before we give you the facts.Players start with eight random facts/habits about themselves.People who are tagged need to write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules. At the end of your blog post, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.

Well, me being me, I'm not going to burden anyone else with this tagging business. But I've done my bit and written eight random facts about myself. Hope you don't get too bored reading them. Please feel free to post random facts about yourself in the comments section.

1) I’m a chocoholic – I love almost ALL forms of chocolate – dark, milk, white – I can even come at compound chocolate in a desperate situation, and kinda crave the stuff around Easter when so many cheap eggs are made of the compound stuff. Valrhona chocolate is my favourite brand, but I will stoop to the level of Lindt when necessary ;-) I also have become hooked on Koko Black, since my return to Melbourne, and am a fan of the work of the Belgians in the chocolate world. When I started working at Harvey Nichols in London I was told my duties would be these (based on some very correct assumptions made about myself by my rather hideous boss Steve, who took being compared to David Brent as a compliment and even danced a bad dance like him at the HN Christmas party):

· I was to work on the Valrhona chocolate counter, selling amazing chocolates that went for the bargain price of 40quid per kilo. I was told I could eat the chocolates, and was encouraged to do so in order to recommend flavours etc. I insisted they clarify exactly how many chocolates per day would be acceptable to eat, given they cost at least 50p each. We agreed on four a day, and four high quality chocolates sated my chocolate cravings in a way that it takes a half block of Cadbury’s to do so. FYI, the Valrhona dark chocolate with pear ganache was my definite favourite.

· I was to sell Wusthof knives. These are my favourite knives in the world. I have quite a few (less than I used to thanks to a certain Brazilian failing to send some home from Portugal, which in some ways hurt me more than his infidelity). The Germans know what they’re doing in the knife department, and I just love them in their fully-forged glory. Good cookware is to me what porn is to others – I can drool over a saucepan (like my gorgeous Le Creuset). Going into the cookware section of a high end department store gets my heart racing in a very special way.

· Based on this cookware-induced excitement, I also got to be in charge of selling Alessi gear, which I also love (and only own one piece of due to the prohibitive expense). I one day hope to own a set of the gorgeous Big Love ice-cream bowls with their matching heart-shaped spoons.

Still on the food thing (yes, I am borderline obsessive about it), I am a bloody good cook – it’s one thing I know for sure about myself – and I used to host a cooking show on Channel 31 called The Generic Gourmet. I was only 19 at the time, and we filmed it in my dodgy student kitchen in Fitzroy. At the time, TV chefs were all still filming in studio kitchens, so I was years ahead of Jamie Oliver and all the rest. I got fan mail and my minestrone episode was the most popular and frequently repeated for more than a year or so, until Channel 31 started to get some decent programming and could stop running little old me.

And I love Milo. Used to have to get friends to bring it back from Australia for me when I lived in Europe for five years.

(Gosh, I better try and make the rest of these things short or you’ll be here all day reading!)

2) I love my friends. I treat many of them like family. I love helping them wherever and whenever I can. I especially love expressing my love for them through cooking. (See above for food/cooking obsessions). I put a lot of time and effort into my friendships and can sometimes end up disappointed when that effort isn’t reciprocated. But that’s the risk you take when you emotionally invest in other people and there’s no way I can change that aspect of my personality – it’s a key to who I am, ie a generous and loving person. I do, however, need to get better at both adjusting my expectations and learning to stop being too bloody nice to some people who don’t really deserve my friendship. I also need to learn to stop expecting so much from myself.

3) I am the classic eldest child. I’m the one who worries about meeting my parents’ expectations and making them happy, even through periods of my life when they weren’t making me very happy. I can’t help but feel I let them down by almost getting married last year and almost giving them the grandchildren they so desperately desire, but then breaking up with my fiancé and taking that away from them. But then again, I think it is unfair to expect your children to marry and provide you with grandchildren – as a parent, it’s you choice to procreate, you should not expect your children to do the same – hope maybe, but not expect that of them.

4) I’m a serial long-term relationship girl. I don’t do casual things well – I can do the dating thing for only a few dates, then I know whether I have feelings for the bloke or if I have to ditch them. It’s just who I am – a boots and all kind of gal. I need a strong man who is not intimidated by me being strong too, who can let me have my way when it’s important to me but pull me up when I need to be. When I was with my ex-fiancé, we really struggled because he was Brazilian and used to being a macho man and I’m a strong, ballsy Aussie chick. He was used to getting to be the man and having his way, I want nothing short of 50/50 equality (I’ve been the dominant person in a previous relationship and I didn’t like that either and ended it. I don’t want to be the boss, I want to be someone’s partner).

5) I love shoes. I have a real problem with them, or a problem with buying lots of them, to be more specific. I have at least 60 pairs, probably more, I don't count them often. I just can’t help myself with shoes. But I am disciplined and only very rarely let myself spend more than $50 on a pair, as I can invariably get cute shoes on sale for much less than that, often around the $20 mark. Exceptions being boots and very comfortable leather walking shoes.
I’m a brilliant shopper, if I do say so myself. I have NEVER met anyone who can hunt down a bargain better than me. It’s a gift, I’ve tried to teach it, but have only been moderately successful on that front.

6) I miss my grandparents so much. I totally adored my grandmother and grandfather on my Mum’s side. I spent a few periods of my life living with them when my sister had operations when I was young. I’m very like my Nana – multi-talented, good with money, smart, opinionated (I’m not full of myself, but am aware of my gifts – I don’t believe in false modesty. Don’t fret about my ego – my friends will tell you I’m very hard on myself too). My Nana died when I was 18 – she had a massive heart attack. Pa called to say she had collapsed. I jumped in the car and drove over there while my sister called an ambulance. I beat the ambulance, and gave Nana CPR for about five minutes until the ambos got there. She was still so warm, I thought I could bring her back. But the damage to her heart was too severe. She almost died as she’d wished. She always said she wanted to go in her sleep – a massive heart attack where she barely knew what hit her was the next best thing, really. Pa was lost without her – Nana was his whole world. I hope there’s a heaven and they’re reunited up there, with Pa still bringing Nana breakfast in bed. I’d love to climb into bed with Nana again and have Pa bring me breakfast – a hot Milo and quincey jam on toast (my standard order – I was about 10 before I found out that Nana’s quince jam was not really named quincey. I guess they thought it was cute and never corrected me).

7) I’m legally blind in my right eye. I can detect movement, and can see blurred blocks of colour, but that’s about it. Meant my Top Gun fantasies were shot down just like Maverick and Goose were in the firefight with the Migs.

8) I’m good with languages. My parents always tried to push me on them when I was younger, recognising my gift, but I wouldn’t give in. Have never been one for sitting down and studying vocabulary, prefer to learn in a more hands-on way. Took me about six months of living in Portugal to reach a decent conversation level, and was relatively fluent by the time I left after a year in Lagos. I make the effort to meet up with Portuguese speakers here in Melbourne, which is not always easy. My Portuguese has pretty much overwritten my once relatively fluent Italian. I can still understand Italian without any problems, but when I go to speak it, it comes out in Portuguese. Didn’t affect my French, though. Weird.

So there you go, eight random facts about me. Fair play to anyone who's made it down here - true dedication, I like it!

Buttons galore

I get the theory behind the old Chesterfield. I don't love them, but I don't have a moral objection to them in the right context. You know - period home, yada yada.

This one, however, just seems to have too many buttons. I think it's the ones on the bottom of it that push it into uptight button land. I don't want an uptight couch, I want something comfortable that I can sink into and relax.

According to the bible that is Vanity Fair, when Jen and Brad split up (side note: will never forget a txt my friend Gosia sent me back in January 2005 "First the tsunami, now Brad and Jen... Will we ever smile again?"), Jen was happy about one thing. It wasn't the obvious, ie. that she no longer had to worry about giving birth to a child with the freakishly strong jaw any Jen/Brad offspring would have inevitably had. It was this: she was glad to finally have a comfy couch to sit/lie/nap on. Apparently, with Brad being the architecture buff he is, all the furniture in their house was all about the design and not a lot about the comfort.

After splitting up with my Brazilian fiancé last year under rather tumultuous circumstances for which you must buy me alcohol in order for me to reveal (believe me, the tale is worth the cost of a dozen pints of Bulmers), I was glad I no longer had to worry about him trying to reassure me that polyester and nylon were better to wear in summer than COTTON. He reckoned they were more breathable. Yeah, whatever...