Venial Sin

This article in The New Yorker is perhaps one of the single most disgusting, disturbing things I have ever read. At the end of the nine pages, I would cheerfully watch each and every one of the people involved in this travesty of human behaviour suffer. A lot. And people wonder why there’s so much rage against the current U.S. administration. Perhaps because they seem to consider that they are–in some way, shape or form–inherently absolved from adhering to policies [...]

I just don’t understand the logic involved in giving me a double-promotion and knocking six years off my career-path but STILL waiting the remaining month of my probation period before making me permanent. Am I missing some essential logic here?

“Are you mental?” I asked him, pulling back. “I have absolutely no intention—no matter how far gone I may be in matters of starfucking—of getting it on with someone who’s part of a band called “Super Junior”. How on earth is that supposed to enhance my sexual portfolio? “Oh hello, yes, I slept with a pre-pubescent K-pop singer who’s actually just one of thirteen band members”?? Like hell! It’s the whole group or nothing”, I concluded, “and I refuse to [...]

On Thursday—since I was spacing myself in order to keep Hopkins eager for my company—I had planned to go out with Egcellent, but he got shanghaied by his boss and couldn’t make it to Bangkok for the night. And desperate not to be alone that night in order to teach him a lesson I responded to one of the seventeen-odd text messages Hopkins had sent me in the past four hours and asked if he’d like to get dinner. “No [...]

Hopkins and I didn’t wake up for quite a while the next day, due partly to the vast amounts of alcohol that both of us had consumed, and also our…well, we were both fairly tired out from other activities of a slightly more strenuous nature. When we finally rolled out of bed, him modestly clutching a pillow and me decorously putting on one of the bathrobes that I really meant to purloin and never actually managed to, we ordered in [...]

Enough. I refuse to wake up as a 28-year-old and wonder “What if…?” There will be no more regrets. No more instances of wondering, of pondering, of worrying. I am who I am, and if someone can’t cope with that, then they have their own shit to sort out. I have no intention of being a victim any more, if indeed I ever was. I will not be the only 28-year-old on the planet to have never dated someone “properly”. [...]

As tends to be the case, the night itself passed in an entertaining fashion. At some point just before dawn, I woke up and logged on to check my e-mail (I don’t know, I do these things) and proceeded to tell anyone who was online at that hour about how I’d managed to meet someone who wanted to sleep with me. Responses were uniformly along the lines of “Go back and shag him some more, you blithering idiot!”, as all [...]

Our last stop for the night was what Diplomat had described to me in an e-mail as “the gay club of Bangkok”, a fairly cool place called DJ Station. I would have paid more attention to the crowd there, except for the fact that the wall behind the bar was lined with every imaginable flavour of Absolut, and in my eagerness to sample Absolut Pear and Absolut Ruby Red, I pretty much elbowed my way through the crowd. It wasn’t [...]

My first night in Bangkok was…interesting, to say the least. The most entertaining Egcellent popped up at my hotel room at eight in the evening, having waded through a thunderstorm that had me curled up in bed with a cigarette and a copy of Marisha Pessl’s Special Topics in Calamity Physics that I had nicked from Über’s night-stand on my way out the door. The flight to Bangkok was fine, albeit somewhat hectic; I got back from Islamabad on Monday [...]