Thoughts on America

So, some of you I've met already know I travelled a long, long way to be here but since me and Miss Saigon are from out of the country (she, France, me Australia) occasionally we have a little compare about "here" and "there". To be perfectly honest, I absolutely fucking love your country and would live here without hesitation, on the other hand, there are some kinda weird things that you do here in the ol' U-S-of-A that maybe you could take a couple of pointers on:

Pennies: Do you seriously fucking need these? Do you? I still can't figure out how to lose that extra inch from my wallet that is ALL pennies. You can't leave them with the tip as apparently it's an insult to your waiter. People at the cashier have no patience for you to count them out and homeless people simply look at you in disgust, as they should. So wouldn't it be easier to just round it up or down, just ONE or TWO cents? Seriously.

Paying to receive texts and calls: I can't even imagine what kind of etiquette questions this would pose in stingy ol' Australia, where people with no phone credit cadge text messages the way you bum a cigarette or a light. What if you were saving your last fifteen cents to tell your friend where you are, then some dickhead sends you one of those really awful, sex joke texts that they forwarded on from their Mom? I get those all the time from one of my friends, then again, maybe that's just her. You know, her Mom's like, one of those heaps modern, "Myspace Moms". Do you have those here? Okay maybe not.

Huge meals and doggie bags: Alright, a little rant: you guys have this restaurant thing all mucked up. First of all, you pay your waiters $3.40 an hour, which is not okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know they're supposed to get tips and all, but seriously couldn't you just pay them properly and stop serving like, two meals' worth of food and save the dough that way? Invariably when I want to take my perfectly good, half-eaten meal away ('cos by Australian standards, there's still enough food for a whole meal there) you take it away and put it into a STYROFOAM. CONTAINER. That is like, so passe by environmental standards, just so you know. Then they put it in another, paper bag and then into a plastic bag. Whoa. It would be wasteful to throw that food out, yet the amount of packaging they use means it looks like a Christmas present by the time I get it back. I don't NEED all those bags dude. I know in Australia you don't usually bother with doggy bags (I hate that phrase) 'cos our meals are like, person-sized, but I see a lot of people do it here (with a LOT of food left over). So when I get to a city of 25 million people and see this happening everywhere, every day I realise that the planet is seriously on the fast-track to being FUCKED. Did you ever hear about the North Pacific Gyre? Argh.

Health Care: I know you don't need me to rub it in. You're in a bad place with that right now, but then again maybe your new president will do something about it. Good-looking guy by the way. Our K Rudd could take a few pointers from your Obama.

Right?

Leaving trash bags on the curb for collection: Where I come from, this sounds like you're sending one of your very drunk friends home in a taxi, but in New York they seriously do that, bags and bags of the stuff out on the pavement, every day. It wouldn't be so bad except that the bags leak all this sweet and sour garbage soup everywhere and THAT'S why New York smells like shit. I always get this tangy swamp smell on my clothes, yuk. So, I don't know how much crap people have to throw out every week but we get by with two small-ish bins (one for recycling, one for other stuff), maybe you should suggest it to your mayor (when the Swine Flu outbreak is over, dude seems pretty busy with damage control right now).

Anyways, that's all from me. Nothing sneaker-related in this post but like I said, I have to be ultra discreet. You'll know when you KNOW, alright.