Monthly Archives: November 2015

This one did not

Newborn, I choose you!

I’ve started treating my friend’s baby pictures like Pokemon battle cards and it’s beginning to get weird.

 

Recently, one of my high school kindred spirits (we once had to tackle a 5 kilometre walk home from a party during which we stopped being friends, ate microwavable hotdogs from a 7/11, became best friends again and thought mixing blue Cruisers and strawberry milk was a fantastic idea – so yeah, kindred spirits) squeezed life out of one of her more malleable orifices. Five days overdue, the little sucker came out looking like an actual baby, not a half-formed pink chicken-armadillo hybrid. Not only was he healthy, had all four limbs, twenty phalanges and apparently an incredibly large scrotum – but he was also actually cute.

 

Obviously it was marvellous for his parents, but also a huge relief for me: I didn’t have to pretend the offspring was cute when it looked like something the cartoonist who made Ren and Stimpy would have drawn.

 

I’m not known for my sugar coating. I’ll either call a spade a spade and then be forced to furiously back peddle or, if I’ve given actual thought to my words, I’ll avoid the digging implement all together. While I’m not as bad as my older sister who walked into the bathroom of our other sister’s new house and tactlessly articulated her opinion of the room with a great big “yuck”, I’m not much better. I’ve been known to rant about the crapness of Transition Lenses to a person only to see their of spectacles darken as they exited the building that afternoon, complain about smokers crippling our health system to table of a pack-a-dayers and tell someone that flat-brim cap and white sunglasses wearers are scum of the earth only for a subsequent Facebook stalk to reveal they had heartily dabbled in both (although that last discovery has only fuelled my mocking of said trash accessories in their presence). Most of the time, people can laugh off my stony comments or simply join me in pretending it never happened. There are the occasional painful silences that follow, but usually it’s something I can bounce back from.

 

But I feel like making fun of the human being someone brewed up inside them and squished their bladder to make room for is something of a kick to the guts (or a slap on the freshly-stitched area between their vaginal opening and their anus – whatever hurts the most). It’s something you wouldn’t plan on doing, and it would be very hard to explain to anyone that it “just happened accidentally”. An assault that painful wouldn’t be forgiven easily.

 

So I was absolutely thrilled when the image my friend sent through to me (which, by the way wasn’t on Instagram – hashtag exclusive!) was bloody adorable. I didn’t have to dance around the ugliness of her offspring with “oh, he’s so tiny” or “look how … alert he is”. I could genuinely comment on his pleasing physical appearance. The only faux par was when I was foolishly allowed to nurse the infant and didn’t really know how to support his head (pretty lazy on his part if you ask me – I mean, I don’t do much either, but at least I don’t expect people to keep my airway clear).

 

Since the initial meet and great (I brought cob loaf, obviously) I’ve been given a few more pieces of photographic evidence that my friend was able to keep the new human she now owned alive, but also fully clothed and even clean. Sometimes, I found myself furiously scrolling through our text conversation just for a hit of baby-induced oxytocin. And I haven’t stopped there. I’ve become one of those people I used to roll my eyes at, showing people images of a baby they’re completely unrelated to and totally uninterested in (I know that sigh, because I used to be that person).

 

But my annoying baby photo assault has kicked up another gear, as I am apparently reaching the competitive stage. No longer content with boring people with offspring imagery and anecdotes about my friend’s power cervix, I’ve started trying top other people with similar infant connections as if they are Digimon game consoles. Like a 12-year-old with a regular income stream of pocket money and access to a Big W, I am ready for virtual battle and always looking for my next opponent. It happened the other night, after The Office went out for drinks.

 

The New Uncle’s sister had just had a baby girl and eventually the conversation turned baby photos. Smelling blood, I pounced, quickly whipping my phone out like it was Pokeball (“picture of baby sucking fingers, I choose you!”). It was quite late in the evening by this stage, but the conversation went something along the lines of:

 

Me: I know you’re like related to her and everything, but look at my friend’s baby.

 

*implies that obviously, my Pokemon/official newborn representative is much better looking than The New Uncle’s weak attempt at cuteness.

 

Me: You know how babies look like bloody aliens when they first come out?

 

*again, implies that obviously, my Pokemon/official newborn representative is much better looking than The New Uncle’s weak attempt at cuteness.

 

Me: Well this one is like two days old and it actually looks like a human.

 

*finally, implies that obviously, my Pokemon/official newborn representative is much better looking than The New Uncle’s weak attempt at cuteness, winning the battle.

 

I don’t know where the conversation went from there, but it definitely involved me showing the poor people I work with multiple snaps of my victorious infant before someone no doubt deliberately steered the topic away from human reproduction.

 

The lesson in this is obviously that your appearance is the only thing that counts. That’s right, we’ll start judging you on your looks even if you’ve only just had the innards of your mother hosed off your skin and you don’t know what fingers are. You’d better learn now that your worth is based entirely on your facial features and physique even though you had no say in how they appear: welcome to the material world, Baby J.

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Daily thoughts, This one did not

Saturday thoughts

Nah yeah: Having someone tell me “I like your top,”.

Yeah nah: That “top” was actually a dress. I suppose when you catch yourself saying something like “yeah, this is a cheeky Supre number,”, you’re already confirming that you probably shouldn’t be wearing said “top” as a dress in public.

It doesn’t matter if a trashy clothing chain marketed that flammable piece of fabric to you as appropriately-lengthed to adequately cover enough front and back bum to maintain a certain level of esteem in the public sphere – that’s a charade you’re supposed to be able to see right through after you’ve got two decades and the odd university degree under your belt.  Somewhere along the line you’re suppose to pick up on whether a four-year-old dress you used to wear in college is exposing so much leg it’s cruising right through upper-thigh territory and on the cusp of arse cheek terrain.

I have business cards for goodness sake.

 

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Daily thoughts, This one did not

Thursday thoughts 

Nah yeah: Clocking up two free bowls of potato wedges.

Yeah nah: Finding out that trivia about how far back my cervix is isn’t generally considered good small talk over said deep fried potato shards. Apparently wedges don’t set the tone for chat about how finding my cervix was like a game of cat and mouse for my doctor.

I would like to know who wrote this rule book and where they credit their authority to make such decisions.

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This one did not, Thoughts from the road

An inconvenient booth

Friendship is always an inconvenience.

 

There. I’ve put it out there. I’ve already tackled people who hate early hot cross buns and present giving, so I’m going to move right on up to friendship and slap it so hard on its bare thigh that a welt of my open hand immediately begins to redden. Dannielle’s personal crusade against things that should be considered pleasant has set out again, riding on the noble steed of overthinking and powered by an artillery of wingeing weaponry (the arrows are tipped with general distain for happy people for added efficiency!).

 

That’s right, I’m pointing my blasphemous blade buttons (explanation: the pen may be mightier than the sword, but a keyboard is much more efficient and a well-timed sarcastic emoticon can cut deeper than any dagger) at one of the most sacred unions of all, more powerful than matrimony or family ties as these people don’t share bank accounts with you or may need to borrow a hunk of your liver down the track. There’s no tangible bond to this group of humanoids, who either hang around you because they genuinely like you or because they’re jealous of your Mary Kate and Ashley memorabilia collection and want to take control over your twin-themed empire when you meet your untimely end. They pass you toilet paper in public bathrooms when your stall is out, they watch you messily eat fajitas without live tweeting how long it takes you to realise you have guacamole in your eyebrow and they take care to only tag you in photos where your arms are at their skinniest.

 

But there’s a certain darkness to friendship that isn’t present in pre-teen Hilary Duff lyrics: the expectation that you’re a nice person back to these people.

 

Sure, your gleaming grin and pert butt might have won them over to begin with, but there’s only so many times you can bring up that time they pooed on their hand and didn’t notice.

 

The other day, the Youth of the Office were planning A Night on the Tiles, and Our Blue-Shirt-and-Black-Pant-Wearing Counterpart requested he stay on My Golden-Haired Sidekick’s couch.

 

Our Blue-Shirt-and-Black-Pant-Wearing Counterpart: *makes some comment about not wanting to be a hassle.

 

Me: Friendship is never an inconvenience!

 

Our Blue-Shirt-and-Black-Pant-Wearing Counterpart: *exits, sneering at my naivety.

 

Me: Actually, friendship is a massive inconvenience.

 

And I was right. Because while they may kindly feed you with vodka and help you prepare a roadie “water bottle” filled with the sickly nectar of alcoholic peach for a bus ride on a Monday morning, there’s always going to be a catch.

 

Take, for example, the time I went to The Cricket with My Curly-Haired Friend. She let me roll out a swag on her tiny apartment lounge room floor and warmly encouraged the guzzling of spirits before 10.30am. And everything was wonderful. We sipped at our questionably-coloured beverages on the back of a city bus and hurtled into the promise of live viewings of The Cricket.

 

Sure, we only sat there for less than an hour before the game was over and clearly annoyed the diehard fans with our delirious banter about wickets, but there was fun had by all (read: just us – everyone else was as serious as you could imagine people taking a Monday off work to pay actual currency to sit in a ghost town stadium would be). When the game had finished, we made plans to visit a tropical fruit themed pub and quickly broke ranks to toilet ourselves ready for the next adventure.

 

But it wasn’t to be.

 

After splitting up, My Curly-Haired Friend got lost in the parents’ room and had to be taken out to the nearby grassy area for a nap. Thankfully, I was a quick-witted enough to march her right to the nearest fast food restaurant, which we’ll call Schmack Shonnald’s. This was quite a task, as it was up a gentle slope and I was only mildly less-hydrated than she. I dumped her in a chair outside and purchased us chips, nuggets and a cheeseburger – the true golden trio.

 

So there we were, at roughly 1pm on a Monday morning trying to avoid the longing gazes of office employees who wished their lives were also going nowhere so they could be stinking drunk on a weekday. But then, I don’t have excellent eyesight, so there is a small chance I misread their expressions – judgement and jealousy look pretty similar when you are constantly squinting.

 

As if this wasn’t bad enough, my Curly-Haired Friend was leaning over the seat, occasionally dry retching between letting her saliva drain out of her mouth and on to the floor. To the untrained eye, she looked like she was dying, and I looked like a callous bitch sitting next to her completely unaffected, chomping at a cheeseburger like I hadn’t a care in the world. My lifelong companion was trying to vomit right next to me, and I wasn’t trying back her hair so it wouldn’t be matted with chucks of her half-digested breakfast. I didn’t even appear to vaguely attempt to be a decent human being by rushing to fetch her a bowl to empty her stomach into so some down-trodden teenager wasn’t forced to deal with the violent, and probably milky, excrement. It was a hot day, and that puddle of vomit would have dried and hardened like the paper mache of nightmares. And yet I didn’t intervene in any way. I simply occasionally attempted to shove a nugget in her mouth and carried on about my business.

 

This is not one of my behaviours that can be attributed to dry-ice cold heart (touch it and you’ll get excruciating frostbite of the fingers!). The thing is that my Curly-Haired Friend can’t actually vomit. She’s one a few Australians who won’t chuck up after a particularly long stint with her mouth around the hose of a beer bong. Not only because she is a legend, but because it’s physically impossible for her to do so.

 

My knowledge of her anatomical makeup stems from tit bits I was told/overheard while eavesdropping as a plucky youngster tainted by the shaky foundations of my childhood understanding of the human body. Essentially, as a baby she kept vomiting up everything and so the hospital staff, no doubt having had an absolute bloody gutful of cleaning up her breast milk vom, cut open her stomach and inverted the reflux valve thing in her stomach (in my mind, this process was somewhat similar to the tying of a balloon). The cheeky trick meant whatever does down her hatch only comes out one way, and left her with a scar that probably sparked a few rumours about a secret caesarean section at the age of 14. It’s just one of many little quirks my Curly-Haired Friend possesses.

 

But that’s enough about the rare and magical innards of My Curly-Haired Friend**. We’re sitting at outdoor table, with a puddle of saliva sizzling on the cement and a stack of nuggets going uneaten. Despite my assurances to her that shovelling crispy chunks of chicken essence down her throat would dilute the spirit concentrate in her gut, she wouldn’t eat past a single bite of a nugget. Like that weedy brother from Beethoven’s second limply trying to get a St Bernard puppy to drink milk off his finger, “it was no use”. So, obviously, I ate the rest of the nuggets myself. As did I with the chips. And the cheese burger. And because I had kind-heartedly called us a taxi to get her safely home, all that was waiting for me was the removal of my pants and a solid nap.

 

Looking back, I can say this: My Curly-Haired Friend was spot of bother that day. Because of her selfish inability to regurgitate, I was forced to drag her around. But, because of her selfish inability to regurgitate, I was also able to eat enough deep fried matter for two, and her appalling posture and slobbery lip made me look like the put together person in comparison. And that’s a beautiful thing. Friendship may be inconvenient at times, but often it’s the best kind of inconvenience there is*.

 

 

*Note: this model of friendship is built on nearly two decades of familiarity based on being forced to be by each other’s sides by comically-small class sizes and a shared enthusiasm for telephone farts and birthday faxes. Replicate it at your own risk.

 

** She really does have fantastic innards. She used to do this really cool belly button/umbilical chord trick which was a real hoot in Year 7.

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This one did not, Thoughts from the road

I don’t like cricket, oh no

You should always be willing to try new things, especially when those things are likely to involve day drinking.

 

Last week I had a whole week off, and was asked by my Curly-Haired Friend to head along to a cricket match. This sounds like a quintessentially Australian thing to do, except this little Vegemite is perhaps not as Australian as she might seem (stumbling around in a dirty koala costume on Australia Day with a XXXX Gold stubby in your hand tends to make you look pretty bloody dinky-di). You see, I have a dirty little secret:

 

The Cricket has never been my thing.

 

Sure, I have fond memories of playing deceptively-named Four Wicket Cricket (deceptively-named that the wickets weren’t wickets – my school couldn’t seem to afford four actual wickets as we had go around the lunch area and pick up all the bins and drag them on to the sports oval to be used instead of three sticks in the ground. This usually resulted in a few banana peels and empty poppers being strewn across the oval), and I have always enjoyed the small ego boost that came from Australia’s almost constant dominance over international teams, but that’s about where it stops.

 

My household was a very anti-cricket environment. Not only was it never watched, but it was openly mocked. My NRL mad parents would groan as their favourite television shows were cancelled because of one of those match tests, and the cricket report was the only time the news was every turned down over dinner (needless to say, my father probably learned more about his children over the summer months). My parents’ physical reactions to accidentally stumbling upon a game while channel surfing was perhaps on par with how everyone under 30 responds when The Project allows a token right-wing baby boomer on the show just so the regular presenters have someone to fight with. And just like my tendency to ramble was passed down to me by my mother, so too was my distain for The Cricket.

 

This distain has rarely served me well. For one, I only know the cricket players who featured on the Wheatbix ads or are a “Warnie”. This means I’m crap at Australian-themed quizzes. The other week our Reporter of the Sports was away, and I found myself faced with the prospect of writing a story about The Cricket. The idea of having me write things about The Cricket is a bit like trading pants with Charlie Sheen’s character in Two and a Half Men – it makes absolutely no sense, is borderline dangerous and is likely to result in the spreading of a severe rash. But, unlike trading slacks with perhaps the most lovable sleaze on reruns, this was something I had to do. Thankfully, I guy a play trivia with knew the captain of a local team and pre-warned him of my complete lack of knowledge about the apparent gentlemen’s game. Not that this was necessary in the end, as it probably came across when I had to ask said captain “… and wicket meant getting someone out – yeah?”. Thankfully, this captain had the patience of 1000 driving instructors and calmly explained the details. With his help and a few Google searches I ended up with a few paragraphs about an actual match. Sure, my lingo was sloppy, but I managed to string something together. And while I took my trivia mate’s assessment of the yarn as “not too bad” as a message not to ask any follow-up questions, I felt like I just scraped through Wickets 101 – which felt like a victory for me.

While bolstered by the knowledge that my understanding of The Cricket was at best “not too bad”, I still was yet to subscribe to the sport Australia Day ads made me feel like I was a soulless alien for not being obsessed with. So the request to pay actual money to sit and watch an actual game was met with a degree of scepticism on my part. Here’s a transcript of an exchange between my and my Curly-Haired Friend after she asked me to go with her to The Cricket:

 

Me: That would be an interesting day out for this cricket atheist.

 

Curly-Haired Friend: Atheist or enthusiast?

 

Me: Atheist. I don’t believe in it, but will happily drink to it if everyone else is. Convert me!

 

Curly-Haired Friend: You don’t believe in cricket?

 

Me: Ehh. I acknowledge its existence but nave never joined in the mass worship.

 

Curly-Haired Friend: Every time you say that a little Warnie dies.

 

At this point, it looks like I’m going to give The Cricket the flick, but here’s the plot twist: I agreed. While I may have thumbed my nose at my country for not liking The Cricket, there are a few pastimes I revel in that are inline with the forefathers of this great nation: consuming fermented barley, shouting obscenities at strangers and acting like I’m the king of the world because someone of my nationality does something noteworthy. And all of these activities can be done at a live sporting match, and in the daytime no less. I can live with not being a sporting super fan, but turn my back on day drinking? That’s just bloody unAustralian.

 

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Daily thoughts, This one did not

Tuesday thoughts 

Nah yeah: Being able to restrain myself from smuggling a whole fucking bowl of gravy/the ooze of eternal sunshine out of the pub when my boss treated us to a platter of deep fried nibblies for the big race.

This is a pretty huge deal for me. I mean, I love gravy. Give me the choice between a lavender-scented bubble bath and a simmering tub of gravy and I’ll bomb dive into that beautiful brown goo every single time. I may even dedicate a longer post to the stuff in the coming months.

So the fact that I didn’t tip it into my empty cider glass and smuggle said cup out of the pub in my cleavage or even ask the bar staff for a straw so I could sip at that salty, vaguely-meat-flavoured goodness for the duration of the Melbourne Cup festivities is a huge personal victory for this gravy guzzler.

I would have happily shunned my coworkers and the excitement of horses running around in circles to hide in a dark corner to savour the secret joy snorting roughly half a litre of gravy.

Yeah nah: Realising I had classily waltzed up to the bar with a battered fish fillet in my hand and unconsciously used it was a pointing stick. Wasn’t. Even. Drunk.

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This one did not

Leaf tea alone

A cup of tea made by another’s hands really is really a brew of disappointment and lies.

Yesterday a friend of mine made a Facebook post about a fear of a poorly-made cup of tea and I practically commented a fucking novel in support for this claim. Because while people tell themselves that they’re doing you a favour by fixing you a cup of love, in reality they’re constructing a no win situation for the drinker. That’s right, I’m turning making someone a comforting drink into a punch to the breast.

I never really understood my mother, who would get incredibly stressed when people did things for her. As a bright-eyed and horrendously chubby child, I was shocked to find that my mother didn’t react to me and my siblings’ offering of breakfast in bed of a Mothers’ Day like the women on the Suzannes ads did. Instead of waking up with perfect hair, unwrinkled pyjamas and a warm, loving embrace for the sheer perfections of human beings she brewed up in her woman cave, all we got were disgruntled sighs. I used to think it was because she was a heartless grump who scoffs at the selfless gestures of her love-starved offspring. But today I understand completely. What I now realise is that not only would we have left the kitchen in a mess and woken her up early with our toaster-getting-out-of-the-cupboard noises and poorly-hushed disagreements, the end result was about as underwhelming as opening a bottle of liquid whiteout. Tepid tea, smears of butter on all utensils and some form of toasted bread or pancakes which we never saw Mum eat for breakfast but were repeatedly told by Target catalogues that she would love so much her ovaries would swell to the size of medium grapefruits. If I were to see that little jerk of a human being putting someone through that and expecting a hug to the soundtrack of various versions of It Must Be Love, I would probably slap myself across the face. Mum doesn’t like crumbs in her bed. Mum doesn’t like unnecessary washing up. And she sure as shit won’t stand for a badly-made, lukewarm cup of tea. She didn’t overcome polio for a big old cup of disappointment, for fuck’s sake.

While my mother may sound like a cold, heartless diva (she isn’t, by the way. She still bakes slices and fruitcake for my old work colleagues, does meals on wheels and sends me Happy Unbirthday cards using the free stationary she was given as a gift for donating money to weirdly-specific charities) I think she was right to be disgruntled. Because the only thing worse than a shit cup of tea is having to feign gratitude to the evil creature who made it for you.

As much as I enjoy the thought of someone dedicating five minutes of their life purely for the satisfaction of my needs (hashtag relationship goals), that’s pretty much where it stops for me. Because no matter how many times someone tries to brew you a cuppa, it’s never going to be quite right. I’ve been through some stuff. I’ve experienced the highs and lows of life. I’ve stared at landscapes through public transport windows with a pensive look on my face; I’ve been on a journey to myself and know who I am. So don’t just assume that you know how much milk I want in my fucking tea. You’ll never get me. When Britney Spears’ backup singers sang “you’ve just got to do it your way” in Overprotected (wow, two Britney references in two weeks) I’m pretty sure they were envisaging me, sassily pouring boiling water over a teabag in the mug I always fucking use.

It’s for this reason (and the fact that I am apparently so full of hate my pimples are actually clogged with viscous distain) that I try to avoid making a cup of tea for someone else. Because I’m either serving them a steaming hot cup of I-have-no-idea-who-you-are-as-a-person or forcing my view of the world onto someone and trying to make them conform to my standards. If I want to dismiss all regard for a person’s worth or shape them into a mediocre version of me, I’ll usually do that with my words, not a beverage.

Inevitably someone will add too much sugar, not let the tea steep for as long, go too hard on the milk or assume you like some kind of wanky brew that doesn’t have a name, just an affect labelled in wispy letters over a adjective-laden ingredient list – such as “calming”, “energising” or “suddenly forgetting your life is a pathetic waste of resources because of these organic cranberry flakes”. If you think that literally condensing a person in a standard-sized mug is tricky, then doing it metaphorically is all kinds of impossible. Just like only you can decide if Blurred Lines actually offends you, only you can know how to make your tea.

We all know this, but are regularly cornered in a situation in which it’s good manners to take the cup of tea. You tell yourself how nice it is that you get to set comfortably in the couch while the kind soul fixes you a drink, but that’s just what they want. They lull you into an acceptance of their offer with your warm memories of tea you made yourself and then they piss all over it. They slap a teabag in, slosh around an unmeasured amount of water, dump in a non-descript sweetener and present you with a mug of insults. But they don’t just hand you the cup of tea and leave you be, they expect conversation and gratification. As if drinking the lukewarm piss of Satan isn’t bad enough, now this sadist wants to share things about their life with you and expects you to nod earnestly between over enthusiastic sips of gratitude. It’s kind of like when a lass is bought a drink at Da Clubz and is therefore expected to reciprocate with sexual rubbing of some degree, only instead of a watered down cheap vodka and raspberry you’re given watered down dreams and what’s being violently shoved down your throat is some dribble about their douchebag partner/frivolously pointless university to degree/vague career aspirations to set up a fashion brand in Bali/yoga. As in both situations, you can’t help but wonder how you, as the proud owner of a supposedly fully-formed brain, find yourself in such positions. But despite all your discomfort you grin and bare it, hoping that at least an offer of a sandwich will follow and make everything worth it.

Unfortunately, that sandwich rarely comes.

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