A thing or two about Momo*

*which, incidentally, means ‘peach’ in Japanese, and ‘dumpling’ in Nepalese.

Either way, Momo is delicious.

Momo is 29 years old and lives in Tokyo, Japan, via Melbourne, Australia. She resides with her husband T-bone in a Thumbelina-sized apartment strewn most immaturely with Kubricks, Blythe dolls and Mogu cushions, while the walls bear ‘Dr Strangelove’ and Mike Mills ‘Humans’ posters (although Momo is considering taking down the Strangelove poster as she keeps having rather frightful dreams about nuclear wars. Either that or she is eating far too many Beard Papa pipin’ hot cream puffs and they are messing with her head). Their beloved and incredibly spoilt 7-year-old scrawny-tawny Siamese cat named Sage shall with his paternal grandmother out in the Melbourne suburbs until his wayward parents decide it is time to come home and be responsible grown-ups.

Momo is moody but entirely lovable. She likes fashion, sewing, kewpie dolls and fast motorcars. She likes gaudy jewellery - especially brooches, like BEFORE they became fashionable again - from yesteryear, and enjoys trawling second-hand stores and market-stalls for all things sparkly. Junior Momo used to be a horrid (and I mean horrid) music snob and kept every edition of Rolling Stone from 1989-1995 in mint condition, but really couldn't care less any more. She just likes what she likes when she likes it. I think it is something to do with no longer being a valid member of youth culture.  

Here’s a long, incredibly drawn-out timeline for anyone who cares to read on. Momo’s got a memory like a freakin’ elephant. Perhaps you should pack a snack...

1975

Momo is born two-and-a-half months premature to a pair of freaked-out long-haired teenagers named Mama Jules and Crazy Jimmy. Momo spends her first few weeks of life in a humidity crib wrapped in aluminium foil wearing baby-sized sunglasses. This is Momo’s first-ever fashion statement. A soothsayer nurse assures a very worried young Mama Jules that “Premature babies grow up to be extremely clever and talented.” She was right, you know!

Momo has used her early arrival in life as an excuse for eternal lateness from that point forward.

1978

Momo’s plays with a toy stove and frying-pan set on her third birthday. Momo’s love of cooking ends here.

Crazy Jimmy exits the household stage left. Or actually, Crazy Jimmy’s clothing exits the household stage left, strewn by Mama Jules across the front garden. Crazy Jimmy then follows. He's got too many girlfriends.

1979-80

Momo enjoys fingerpainting and rock music. Her favourite band is Kiss. Momo is often admonished at Kindergarten for giggling. When not giggling, Momo is an anxious child. Upon standing in some motor oil, she cries uncontrollably. Once calmed, Momo sobs to Mama Jules that she might “Accidentally lick the bottom of [her] shoe and die!”

1981

Momo goes to school. She gazes at the hieroglyphics before her and wonders, “Will I ever learn to read?”

Momo draws a capital ‘E’ for Crazy Jimmy with about 15 crossbars. It looks like a comb. She doesn't know when to stop.

In her continued fear of poisoning, Momo asks Mama Jules to find out if her Sesame Street crayons are “non-toxic”.

1982

Momo becomes a prolific reader. She is given her first novel, ‘The Magic Faraway Tree’ for her seventh birthday. Momo is also given ‘Where Did I Come From?’

Momo now understands that Mama Jules (a nurse) did not just ‘find’ her at the hospital one day and decide to bring her home.

Momo eases up on the poisoning issue.

1983

Momo thinks that Michael Jackson is THE business.

Momo has pneumonia, measles and tonsillitis all at the same time. She is in hospital on her eighth birthday and develops a crush on a very nice nurse named Derek.

Momo forgets the letter r in “shirt” on a spelling test. She is very embarrassed to discover that she has written a rude word by accident.

1984

Momo learns how to spell “enthusiastic”. Momo is in love with Simon Le Bon from Duran Duran. Her favourite music video is “Reflex”.

Momo likes fluorescent ankle-socks, crimped hair, and mirrored sunglasses.

Momo quietly freaks out about nuclear war and the potential danger of the sun one day crashing into Earth.

1985

Momo decides that maths just isn’t her thing.

1988

Momo starts high school and goes boy CA-RAZY. Her favourite bands are Bros and INXS. Then Momo’s Uncle Craig gives her his ex-wife’s Never Mind The Bollocks album. Momo begins to turn. She totally loves the Sex Pistols a good eleven years after the year punk ‘broke’, and begs Mama Jules to buy her a ‘God Save the Queen’ tee-shirt.

Momo dyes her hair for the very first time after her best friend Suzy advises that her hair is a “nice brown, but would look better on someone else’s head”. Suzy also tells Momo that she has a “nice-shaped mouth, but it would look better on someone else’s face”.

Momo develops quite a complex.

1989  

Momo decides to stop being friends with Suzy.

Momo furtively copies the names of various bands from the schoolbag of a very cool older boy named Leighton. After some research, Momo no longer likes Bros, still likes INXS, and decides that she also loves The Cure, The Jesus and Mary Chain, The Smiths and PiL.

Momo gets her first-ever pair of Doc Martens and Levi 501s for Christmas. Slick!

Momo suffers a nasty dose of glandular fever and loses 10 kilograms. She goes from being a moderately chubby kid to a very scrawny kid in about two months. Momo is very sick, but gets better. She has problems gaining weight for the next six years. Then, she looked all willowy and lanky when really, in the country, she should be all tanned and strapping, like those girls who were good at netball.

1990

Momo loves Jane’s Addiction, Sonic Youth and The Pixies. She dreams of having chestnut and purple dreadlocks, a safety pin through her nose, and a tattoo of Robert Smith on her thigh. Instead, she ladders her stockings.

1991  

Momo loves the Smashing Pumpkins and Pearl Jam. Momo is suspicious of Nirvana, but decides that they are cool after observing a chick in Sonic Youth’s “Dirty Boots” film clip wearing a Nirvana t-shirt.

Despite her waning enthusiasm, Momo finally gets to see INXS in concert. She takes 36 shots of Simon Day from Rat Cat without realising it. Later, Michael Hutchence LOOKS at her! Or at least Momo thinks he does. She shrieks hysterically in response.

Momo dreams of going to Lollapalooza.

Momo thinks that Val Kilmer as Jim Morrison is better-looking than the real Jim Morrison ever was.

Momo goes to central Australia on a school trip. Dressed in cut-off camouflage shorts, Rossi workman's boots and a 70s paisley maternity smock, Momo freaks out in an attempt to climb Uluru. This is when Momo realises that she is afraid of heights.

1992

Momo does it for the first time ever with a slightly older boy named Dave. When she laughs throughout the entire proceedings, he stroppily advises that he is “NOT A PROFESSIONAL, OKAY?!” Momo has refused to listen to Nirvana’s Lithium ever since.

Momo falls in love with Henry Rollins. She hopes to one day marry a man with that many tattoos.

At a party and egged on by far too much cask-wine, Momo extinguishes a box of 25 matches in her mouth and then goes on to break twelve pencils on her forehead all in an attempt to impress her good friend Matty G.

Mama Jules becomes very ill. Momo doesn’t deal with it very well at all. But she is eternally grateful to Ponygirl, Matty G and Princess Adam for being such wonderful and supportive friends. 

1993

Momo becomes a teenage hussy by trying to ensure that Dave was just a dud shag. By the end of the year, after a whole lotta hussying, she surmises that Dave was just a dud shag.

Momo calls a cop a “Nazi Fascist Gestapo” in an underage-drinking bust.

Momo finishes high school in a blaze of glory despite her total lack of focus.

1994  

Momo moves to an ex-migrant detention centre converted into student residences in Melbourne’s western suburbs. She meets T-bone who moves in upstairs. It is love at first sight.

He has a television, a packet of barbecue shapes and a refrigerator full of ice cream. Momo has a bottle of vodka, some rolled oats, a packet of Peter Jackson Super Mild cigarettes and has recently spent her entire savings of $800 on clothes and CDs.

Momo is very hungry.

Upon first meeting, T-bone and Momo spend six hours straight talking. They even make up their first ever 'in-joke'. Momo thinks T-bone is far too handsome to want to go out with her, but that he’d be a great new best friend. They become an item two days later, and spend all of 1994 in T-bone’s room shagging. Unable to concentrate because of his depleted energies, T-bone is thrown out of university, and Momo barely passes. They move in together at the end of the year. They purchase a lava lamp, a 1950s electric fan and a 1970s fibre-optic lamp and decide that they’re all set in life.

Momo loves Hole and does her darndest to dress like Courtney Love for the prestigious Melbourne Cup. She has the stringy blonde hair as a start …

1995  

When she isn’t at uni, Momo works in a video arcade.

A former friend and neighbour burgles Momo and T-bone’s flat. Momo no longer trusts anyone. Momo develops a nachos addiction and gains about 12 kilos.

Momo later joins a gym and exercises for about the first time in her life.

Momo loves Regurgitator, Spiderbait, The Mavis’s, Magic Dirt, Custard and Def FX and The Foo Fighters.

1996  

Momo defers uni and works at a cinema making choc-tops, selling tickets, and reeling out films in the projection booth. T-bone gets a job playing computer games. They are now moderately cashed-up. Subsequently, they spend all of 1996 stoned and eating Pizza Hut family meals at kooky hours.

Momo loves everything, especially Sara Lee cheesecake, Chemical Brothers and Prodigy.

1997  

Momo works at an advertising agency and does a course in copywriting. After being told by an advertising ‘guru’ before a judging panel that she is a talentless fuckwit, Momo retracts from the world, quits her job, goes on the dole, and stays inside watching music videos for four months in a state of near-catatonic depression.

T-bone and Momo get a little kitty-cat named Sage. They quit smoking cigarettes as they don’t want to harm Sagey’s beautiful big blue eyes. Momo loves Grinspoon.

1998  

After a holiday to Queensland, Momo slowly comes out of her shell and returns to the land of the living and mentally-functional. Momo goes back to uni and finishes her course in Media Studies, she wins an award for being the smartest student EVER and realises that perhaps she isn’t a talentless fuckwit after all, nay, she is a superior wonder-being!

T-bone and Momo get married in a drive-thru wedding chapel in Vegas on New Year’s Eve. In the hours leading up to her wedding, Momo dances maniacally in her underwear, false eyelashes and Sharon-Stone-in-Casino-style bouffant to a Marilyn Manson special on MTV.

When T-bone and Momo eat their hearty wedding feast of club sandwiches, fries, cheesecake and bottled water, Momo removes her wedding dress to go to the bathroom, but cannot get it back on.

Out on the Vegas strip, Momo gets an ultra-long cocktail straw stuck up her nose. She thinks she feels it on her brain.

1999  

After deciding that the television industry is nigh on impossible to break into, Momo gets a job in publishing. Two months later, she is offered a job in television. Momo decides to stick with publishing. Here, she meets many interesting people and makes some great new friends.

Momo slowly learns that at a company of 180 people, you do not have to attend every birthday celebration and partake in cake all the time.

Despite her morbid fear of heights, Momo moves into an eleventh-storey apartment. Momo later learns that the ritzy penthouse apartment above her houses a cocaine lord. She finds this out after the S.O.G. have busted him and her bourgeois apartment block is sullied on the six o’clock news as being a crack house.

Momo develops an undying devotion to Shihad and Rocket Science.

2000  

Momo begins a graduate diploma in editing and publishing. She meets more interesting people.

Momo’s over-bleached hair melodramatically breaks off in great clumps, so she shaves her hair to within one centimetre of its life. It is strangely liberating, but she never leaves home without wearing lipstick.

Various rumours circulate about Momo’s new hairdo, mostly that she has become a militant lesbian and man-hater.

Momo allows the rumours circulate.

2001  

Momo completes her graduate diploma in editing and publishing and becomes a real live book editor without having to be someone’s assistant. Due to a change in workplace 30 kilometres from the CBD, Momo does a crash-course in driving and gets her licence from whoah to go in just two months.

Momo’s favourite pastime becomes hooning down various freeways around town.

She especially likes the thrill of flooring it from sixty to 100 on the on-ramp.

Momo’s hair gradually grows back to its former girly status.

2002

Momo knows that the meaning of life exists because she discovered it at approximately 5.30 a.m. on New Year's Day. Unfortunately, moments after the cogs turned and the universe promptly fell in place, Momo forgot what this meaning of life was, so went back to making prank phone calls to her friends.

Momo bumbles her way into the illustrious subterranean world of blogging while she is bored at work one day.

Momo quickly becomes hooked on peering into other people’s lives and leaving inane comments. Several months later starts her own blog. At first, she worries about what people might think of her silly anecdotes, stories, and life in general, but later decides to just chill out, dude.

Momo loves The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, The Polyphonic Spree, Clinic, D4, The Datsuns and The Hives.

2003

Momo starts the year 2003 with a fabulous holiday railroading it through Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore and ends it in an equally fabulous holiday over the Christmas/New Year period to New York, London and Tokyo. Despite all this excitement and glamour, all that is in between is decidedly blah. Questioning pretty much everything in their worlds as they know it - now that they have good jobs, a good car, and, if they tried hard enough to save instead of frittering it all away on holidays and fine fashions, potentially a good house - Momo and T-bone wonder what to do next … at first, Momo thinks she might become a t-shirt designer.

Keen for a new stab at things, they renew their wedding vows just in time for their fifth wedding anniversary. In Vegas. Again. Momo wears a tutu. T-bone wears his ratty old All-Stars.

They welcome in 2004 in Times Square, NYC, nestled beneath helicopters with machine guns.

Momo loves the The Bronx, Love of Diagrams, The Electric Six, The Rapture, The Fever and Cut Copy.

2004

Momo and T-bone fall positively in love with Tokyo after spending just five days there in early January. Returning home, they decide to start squirreling money away to return there to live as soon as possible. In April, Momo lands a job teaching English in Tokyo and jets off at the end of June, just in time for the biggest heatwave Japan has seen in one hundred years. Or something crazy. T-bone stays behind to finish off a contract and joins Momo in a most happy reunion in September, throwing in his job as a Microsoft flunkie to become the entrepreneurial scamp he always was underneath that tidy suit. Momo is very proud of him.

Next, Momo and T-bone are thinking about living in maybe Hong Kong and London … but not before they travel across Russia on the Trans Siberian Railway.

Momo loves Franz Ferdinand, Ikara Colt and The High-Lows

Enough said? Now go read my blog.