While I'm busy sharpening my knives in preparation for The Gay American's return, I've had a friend staying with me; his previous flatmates seemed to have been experiencing some sort of folie a deux, and accused him of being a spy sent from another country. While he is, in fact, from another country, it seems unlikely that his government would select two ordinary (albeit substance abusing) individuals for such intense scrutiny. However, this accusation was enough to send him in my direction, and here we are now.

It's nice having him around. He's a good person, and doesn't criticise my house or my taste in clothing, unlike some people, whom I most certainly do not care about and will not bring up now. He works as a translator, and as a result our lounge room is scattered with all these exciting and expensive magazines (you know, the type with the "Special Import" sticker on the front of them at the newsagent that I would never actually buy because they cost a squillion dollars*, but love to read) that I CAN’T read, and can’t even guess at because they’re in a language so far removed from English I’m not able to fall back on my two years of high school Latin ("Caecilius est pater" doesn't cut it when you're dealing with what my friend tells me is an in-depth look at the female G-spot). Still, the pictures of people dressed in what is presumably haute couture and spraying one another with champagne/holding hairless dogs/wrapped in razor-wire always make for entertainment.

This one time, he used up all the milk, which sort of pissed me off a bit when I was in the mood for a bowl of after-work muesli. However, he used the milk to make a carrot cake, so it was hard for me to be too cranky once I found out. It wasn't terribly good carrot cake, but when it comes to cake I firmly believe that it’s the thought that counts. Because he's on holidays at the moment, he's doing a lot of reading, and I've been lending him some books along the way. He has a distressing tendency to bend the cover of the book all the way behind its back when he's reading it, and I swear I can hear it scream as he snaps its spine. This is because I too am screaming on the inside; books do not deserve that kind of torture. Still, if this is the worst thing about him, then I really shouldn’t be complaining at all, should I? Fine.

He leaves Australia FOREVER on the eighth of February, which is sad. Sometimes I seriously wonder if I have such deep and unresolved abandonment issues that I have no choice but to develop relationships with people destined to flee the country as soon as we start getting close. Let's save that for some other time.

* I've bought one of those fancy magazines ONCE before, mainly because it had Justin Timberlake in a sleeveless top on the front. Shut up. No, you are.