I’m getting to the stage in my life where people are starting to expect me to have plans.

It’s a stage we all know about and regularly hear about in romantic comedies when the protagonist is stuck at the kid’s table at family functions, and people ask intrusive things about their life. Relationships and career aspirations dominate the dialectic, and usually are deflected with coping mechanisms (painting a tale about how I will probably end up inseminating myself with a turkey baster when I’m forty and realise I’m so alone that I have to actually grow my own best friend as a joke when it’s downright fact) or straight up lies.

The reason I bring this up, of course, is because I have an impending occasion when such questions may be thrown around like accusations of players being insects at the larvae stage in their lifecycle at a rugby league match. It’s an occasion shrouded in a veil of joyous intentions, but have a tendency to force me into darkly intense downward spiral of over-thinking and subversion of happiness by reading too much into things that aren’t actually things to begin with: the wedding. While I won’t know many people there, I know people are going to ask probing questions in the name of small talk. And I want to have my answers ready. I want to have plans that will impress the probably-soaked-with-champagne-pants off them.

I mean, I have plans, but they aren’t particularly good ones. They’re plans that people usually assume are jokes. But they aren’t.

For example, I’m the kind of girl who has already planned the most important details of my wedding: there’s going to be a DIY mini cob loaf bar (think multiple vats of melted cheese with bacon) and a recovery involving a slip’n’slide and 100 goon sacks the next day. I think the promise of hundreds of personal cob loaves and 50-year-olds playing Goon Of Fortune while spitting dye into each other’s faces on a jumping castle in the middle of a paddock is an excellent bargaining chip to get some sorry soul to trade his eternity for. I know I would seriously consider it should the tables be turned. But the people I relay this dream to seem to think otherwise.

Apparently this answer is a signal to the interviewer that the relationship aspect of my future is akin to the question of what happens to the water from the inflatable pools featured in home births – not something anyone should ever talk about, something you wouldn’t hope to deal with personally and something you might consider burning the house down to avoid – they move on to my glistening career, asking me where I hope to end up.

This is kind of where they expect something idealistic and rooted with personal meaning. A sister of mine is really into sensible waste disposal and being all eco friendly, so she’s studying environmental science. My roommate says she always wanted to help people and could never she herself doing anything other than mental health. I don’t have such strong inclinations.

In year 12 my biology teacher asked us to write on a piece of paper what we wanted to be when we grew up. She went around the class and was able to vaguely attach what we could learn in biology to our live goals. Being an OP class that was based on learning stuff instead of coasting by on what you could pull from your arse (art, English, and even sometimes modern history – the Queensland curriculum was a beautiful thing), most of the people in the biology lab were there for a purpose. Some wanted to be zoologists, others wanted to be dentists … and then there was me. My piece of paper had “cynical blogger” written on it.

Which, I suppose is technically true. But it doesn’t really sound like a career goal that stacks up against Old Mate who is fresh off a plane from helping birth babies in chronically poor regions in Vietnam while also coordinating a functionally-useless-but-looks-good-on-the-resume student society and coaching a team of under privileged disabled kids in the local cricket tournament. So, much like the great philosophical deities of Romy White and Michelle Whineburger, I will be attempting to overhaul my life in an impossibly-ambitious time period to at least have something to say at the table.

I’ll be ordering the business women’s special in no time flat!