There’s nothing like essentially calling someone a giant loser to start off a winning streak of a working week.

This morning I was minding my own business when a man in a suit started chatting to me. Man in Suit had engaged in what he thought was a harmless spot of small talk with me, not knowing what he had unwittingly stepped into a vessel of tragedy, much like the ill-fated French friend of Leonardo DiCaprio’s in The Titanic.

Like Leonardo DiCaprio’s Ill-Fated French Friend, Man in Suit thought he was innocently stepping onto the potential to for a life-changing adventure (or a way to pass the time by doing something more interesting than cleaning underneath his nails, some thing really) but instead he was travelling full-steam ahead to the conversational equivalent of a 18.9 metre-high smoke stack (I actually just Googled, ‘how big were the smoke stacks on The Titanic?’ and then had to use Google again to convert 62 feet into a more logical/metric way of communicating the length)falling directly onto his face.

He was telling me that he was somewhat of a locum, saying that he usually did temp work because we was able to.

That last few words should have given me the indication that Man in Suit was romantically unattached. Any normal person with actual social skills would have interpreted this throwaway line as a flashing motorway sign with capital yellow letters flashing “DO NOT IN ANY WAY ALLUDE TO RELATIONSHIPS OF ANY KIND BECAUSE SHIT’S GOING TO GET UNCOMFORTABLE” over oncoming traffic. But because I’m Dannielle I must have thought this meant he had a super flexible rental situation and a goal to wrack up a shittonne of Frequent Flyer points instead. Or at least that must have been what I thought, because that’s the only way I can explain what follows:

Man in Suit says he’s been to 44 different towns in the state for work.

Me: Over how many years?

At this point it is all going swimmingly. I’m asking appropriate questions and seem to be absolutely nailing the professional-casual vibe I’ve been channelling for a few years now. I was actually feeling confident.

Man in Suit: “About four.”

Me: “Do you send a lot of post cards?”

Man in Suit: “There aren’t a lot of postcards *makes joke about postcards and small towns in wording I can’t remember* … I have no one to send them too.”

So here is where most people would show a bit of tact and change the subject and direct the conversation to a smoother course of ocean distracting him from his apparent solitude by maybe joking about the weather or asking about which work station he liked the most. Instead I decide not only to go as fast as my industrial-era boat will take me into waters littered with figurative icebergs of emotional blows, but I also decide to throw the fucking binoculars into the water from the damned crow’s nest just for good measure.

What I didn’t know was at this point in the conversation, an English sailor somewhere was ringing a bell and screaming “iceberg, dead ahead”.

Me: “You could just send them to yourself.”

Around about now the whole fucking crew were freaking out, dramatically closing gates and sealing their colleagues off to a terrible, watery death. I, like everyone else on the damn ship, felt the rumble of the contact with the floating continent of ice, but I chose to respond like the father and son up on deck kicking ice around. I chose to believe that everything was fine.

A few mumbled exchanges had passed by this time, so I channelled that guy with the moustache and ordered a brandy, continuing going about my business.

Little did I know the musicians were gathering to play their mournful tune up on deck.

Me: “You could be like the episode of Mr Bean where he sends those Christmas cards to himself.”

“Actually, that’s really sad!”

And that’s when it finally hit me. There was no way this voyage was awaiting a happy dock in the land of the free. I realised that there was no boyishly-handsome penniless artist around to save me; I’d have to find my own damn floating door or push some selfish 17-year-old clinging to a frozen man off one myself.

Just as things were becoming increasingly desperate, the person/lifeboat we had been waiting for to come back did indeed come back, interrupting the conversation like the poetic metaphor for hope that she was.

She wasn’t holding a torch or shouting in slow motion, but inside I was blowing that whistle with all the strength my half-frozen lungs could allow. And I was saved from those icy waters.

I think I had an epiphany while watching an action movie over the weekend.

My sister and I were walking down memory lane at my parents’ house, and by walking down memory lane, I mean we were sitting on our arses watching video cassette tapes. We decided to watch both feature-length reboots of Charlie’s Angels, mostly because they order burgers in the first movie , with which we had expertly-paired with our room temperature Whopper burgers like that guy with no authority other than his curly hair and authentic dress sense who used to appear in the free Coles magazines and badger you with wine suggestions for recipes.

As we were watching an incognito Drew Barrymore and Lucy Liu detonate a bomb while falling from an aeroplane before landing on a speedboat driven by a bikini-clad Cameron Diaz, I was shocked to find I was more struck Barrymore’s choice of words than the several gaping plot holes I’d just witnessed in the space of about 42 seconds. The guy an incognito Barrymore drags from the plane calls her a “crazy bastard” because she is dressed as a man before she reveals herself as a woman by pulling off her mask and shaking out her unrestrained hair (because why have a practical mess bun holding your hair back during an extremely dangerous assignment when you can shake your hair like you’re on a goddamned Pantine commercial if you manage to pull the highly-unpredictable stunt off?). Before releasing her wild hair that somehow manages not to get stuck in her lipgloss, she says, “I think you mean crazy bitch”.

Now, I’m going to get up on my feminism horse (its name is Uterussa de Fallopian and she is obviously coloured bright crimson because all women who like being treated equally are OBSESSED with making men aware that their vagina is an exit passage for magical menstrual blood and not a mere pleasure sheath for their penis daggers – right?) and raise myself a quizzical brow.

I obviously know why “bitch” is usually associated with women because that’s the name of female dog, but why in the heck is “bastard” limited to male the men in the illegitimate house?

I have always felt I had quite a bit of knowledge about the word. As the daughter of a bastard and a technical one myself, I like ot think I am know. As the resident Queenslander in my office, I have a tendency to follow up/add an air of bogan legitimacy to multiple statements a day by tacking a “ya bastards” on the end. When I’m not referring to someone whose name I don’t know/can’t remember/can’t pronounce as “old mate”, it’s usually replaced with a “this bastard”. But even I have to admit that bastard has its male connotations. And I’d like to know why.

As a well-educated, resourceful young adult, I decided to turn my interests to thoroughly researching the topic: I typed “bastard male term” into Google and clicked the first few links that popped up.

The first link I clicked on was a web forum that looks like it would still be able to “glammed up” by a MySpace profile code.

A couple of cluey people cited conditions, which I can only assume date back to feudal society, when it was all about your inheritance. To me, the term “inheritance” makes me think of the ultimate heiress Paris Hilton and my brain fills with the associated imagery of Von Dutch trucker caps, stringy hair extensions and that weird gargle-scream she would let out when forced to do something gross on The Simple Life. But back then your inheritance was less about whether you’d be able to dress a shaking chihuahua in diamonds and more about whether you’d spend your days literally in the gutter or sitting in a castle as decadent overlord. And you couldn’t inherit the family jewels if you’re the spawn of unwed parents.

Back then women were only valued for their looks (not at all like today) and so while a daughter born to un-wed parents wouldn’t inherit anything, if she had, and I’m paraphrasing here, a knock-out bod and fuckable face she’d be able to marry out of complete poverty. Because women rarely inherited family wealth even if her father put a ring on the woman he planted his seed in, being a bastard didn’t “sting as much”.

But sons of unholy unions had no land, or money, and no future. Apparently marrying rich wasn’t something the fellas cold fall back on in those days.

Then I saw this answer:

“Bullshit, a bastard child has always been a boy child. At least here in the American South. Here we recognise that the female is the benevolent progenitor of all life that folows. They are sacred. Here, only boys are allowed to be bastards.”

which was kind of like biting into a sausage and finding out it’s the penis of Theon Greyjoy: you kind of enjoyed it, but you don’t like knowing where it came from can’t bring yourself to swallow it.

What I could gather from this information is that females are worthless but are also sacred but can destroy a child’s life because of the relationship status of the porksword she falls on. It didn’t really answer my question. I had delve deeper.

I investigated a straight up definition like I was a French exchange student trying to figure out if the new word I’d just been taught by a smart arse kid on my bus route was an appropriate term to slip into conversations with my Australian host parents. But poor Fleur is still just as confused. An online slang dictionary had four definitions for the term:

a derogatory term, usually for an unkind male.

a person born to unmarried parents.

a general insult

a male. Used in e.g. “poor bastard”, “lucky bastard”, etc.

My third link was from a Yahoo answers page, which had generated a bit of discussion from the original question (which isn’t really a question but this is a pressing issue, so who has time to phrase correctly?!):

I heard that Bastard was the term for a “male dog”. I thought it was for a person without a father?

In the answers to follow, each person said a bastard was a child born out of wedlock, or some variant. But each time they said “child” and not “person born with a penis”.

This brings us back to the whole bastard vs bitch debate. The whole notion that as there was a derogatory term from a woman, namely bitch, there had to be an equal term for men. Bastard does kind of make sense. I mean, they both start with “b” so it all fits together very nicely. But then, you can’t really ignore that while a bastard was considered some kind of white trash baby, at least it still belongs to the human race. A bitch is more than a whole other species, it’s a whole other genus, family AND order. So they sort of are COMPLETELY, ENTIRELY DIFFERENT.

Not that I’m advocating for use against either word. Colloquially, each have transcended their original meaning to become something completely new. And they each have their place in our vernacular. Exclaiming, “that was an absolute female dog of an exam” just doesn’t have the same ring to it without “bitch”. And shouting “which one of you children born to parents outside of wedlock changed the order of my highlighters?!” just doesn’t strike the same tone as a cheeky “bastards” would. We use these words because their meaning has evolved to a point where no other term will describe what we’re trying to convey as accurately. Sometimes all you need is a bitch.

I’m sorry, Drew Barrymore’s character who doesn’t have a last name until we find out her true identity is Helen Zaas, but I don’t think the words need to refer specially and exclusively to a particular gender. And this isn’t just because I’m a raging feminist who is burning down the joint using bras and hairspray as starter fuel; it’s because “bastard” is such a fantastic word that its use shouldn’t be limited to referring to just half the population of this magnificent planet. And the same goes for “bitch”.

It’s because while Lisa Wilkinson has been called a saucy bitch, she is also one glorious bastard.

And even though Karl Stefonovic has been called a glorious bastard, he is also one saucy bitch.

And I think we can all agree on that.

In roughly seventeen-and-a-half hours my left hand might be freed from the psychological prison that is my cast.

I’ve discovered the way to break down a person’s spirit and disintegrate their will to live: lock their dominant hand into a restrictive skin and forbid them to get it wet. Setting aside the initial pain of a cracked bone and having to sit through with the re-runs of Neighbours in the emergency waiting room, rocking a cast is one of the more soul-grinding realities you can face. What is on my arm is not a medically necessary bone-setting structure; it is a stench-trapping cylinder of frustration.

If my life were a book (and, god willing, one day it may well be) the past five weeks of my life would be documented within a chapter called The Tube of Misery.

This off-white medical version of paper mache has made life pretty tedious. My left arm smells like a wet towel used to dry a stray dog which was swimming in swampy ocean water, except that wet towel was left on the backseat of a hot car and wrapped around a four-day-old cheese sandwich. What happens when you have a cast on your body is that your musk is trapped in what seems like a slightly-moist sleeping bag. There’s not enough space between the skin and cast to let the dead skins cells air out properly, but there’s just enough room to let the smell waft out. An effect of this is that the skin in the middle of my cast has flaked off, but with nowhere to go has lingered, mixing with my sweat to make a sort of dead skin cell paste. The skin close to the either end of the cast is dry and flakey, and will crisp up and dislodge on its own, making my arm an unintentional slat shaker filled with what looks like dandruff. I’ve had to start wiping the residue off my desk a couple of times a day.

As you might have guessed, this doesn’t make me feel particularly attractive or hygienic.

Hygiene has been a real hurdle for me. I mean, showering is hard enough without adding the extra hurdle of wrapping my arm in plastic. It sounds like a trivial task, but after five weeks the prospect of having to shove my arm into a grocery bag is similar to someone gearing up to plunge their arm into a cow’s vagina to yank a calf out: you do it because it has to be done, but you don’t like it (although I imagine the latter option might have a moisturising effect on the skin). This daily task of gloving up has altered the way I look at beauty. For example, after a few days of recycling my bag today I thought to myself, “it’s the weekend, you go treat yourself to a new plastic bag to put around your cast”. Tres glam.

I also can’t drive, can’t write and hack at vegetables I’m trying to cut up for dinner like I’m a white teenage heroine attacking the villain in a low-budget horror flick: imprecise, sporadic and ineffectual stabs between over-exaggerated sobs. This tunnel of dead skin and crushed dreams also literally crushes my dreams; being so uncomfortable in bed that I can’t sleep. 

But the worst aspect of this arm Alcatraz is how it impacts what I put into my mouth. When the rest of your world is falling apart the only thing that can pick you up from the swirling cesspool of toilet water that your pathetic existence is the prospect of decent schnitty. Imagine how quickly your fragile happiness disintegrates into loose stool when you are hit with the realisation that you can’t cut into the one thing that is keeping you from slamming your head into a brick wall. I had to rely on the kindess of coworkers to cut up my schnit. A bar manager at my trivia pub actually cut up my steak for me. I have to spoon food into my mouth with my right hand, which is as graceful as Bambi’s first steps. Because of this, my scooping abilities have been severely reduced. I can’t scrape a plate like I usually would, which is a whole new kind of torture because I am forced to stare at the food I failed to eat. It’s humiliating.

 To make matters worse, my parents dropped in one weekend and surprised me with a bike (side note: Dad has this fantastic knack for making friends with quirky characters and acquiring random second-hand purchases for no good reason on a whim. In this case, the guy Dad befriended used to go to school with his mancrush, does up old bikes, and grows a shit-tonne of kiwi fruit. Within a few weeks of meeting this man, he had turned up at my house with kilos of kiwis and a bike). This was excellent. The bike even had a bell and a basket in the front for unwrapped baguettes, potted posies and a small puppy – the only things you can realistically put in a bike basket, so years of television watching have informed me. But because of my cast, I’m unable to ride said bike. My father, in effect, had just unknowingly become the biggest clit tease imaginable… Now that was a sentence I didn’t expect to write when I woke up this morning.

But, for all its flaws and inconveniences, this cast has given me one thing I couldn’t have given myself in any other way: a legitimate reason to complain. Complaining is the closet thing I have to a hobby. As you might have already gathered by now, one of my most cultivated skills is taking something positive, dissecting it into fragments, reading far too much into each shard and putting it back together to resemble the most negative concept ever comprehended. A fun family gather? More like a terrible night’s sleep on the spare mattress of my parent’s house. A delicious desert? More like a butter-laden wedge of guilt. A compliment from a casual acquaintance? More like an uncomfortable few seconds of scrambling for an insincere compliment to hit back at them, delivered in such a manner that it sours the relationship like milk left in the afternoon sun.

I’m very good at inventing things to complain about, but it becomes exhausting at times. So when I have a genuine reason to whinge and grumble, I’ll grab it with two hands. Except in this case I can only grab it with one hand, because the other one is in a cast… Do you have any idea how disheartening that is?!