Every Easter I become the psychological prisoner of a single solid Cadbury egg.

It’s destroying my life. Every damn Easter I find myself in this position. Somehow I end up with a small solid Easter egg in my car each year, and after it’s been there for more than six hours, it’s not going anywhere. I keep it in my console, wanting to eat it but never allowing myself to because it might come in handy. I tell myself that I should save it for a rainy day. For an emergency. For when I really needed it.

What kind of emergency would require an old Easter egg, you might ask?

I might never be able to make up an excuse to get out of meeting someone for coffee, but I can invent multiple situations in which the calories provided by a solid chocolate egg can mean the difference between life and death, providing so many details the scenario isn’t just believable, but a near certainty. I convince myself that my car may plunge off a cliff in the middle of buttfuck nowhere, leaving me lost in the wilderness without necessary supplies (food, water, leave-in conditioner). I picture myself being found days later by SES volunteers who were sure I would have died without food. I tell the news crews I managed to survive by rationing the single egg I had on me, and used the foil wrapper to start a fire for warmth. Cadbury then sponsors my life, and I am gifted with a bathtub of novelty chocolates.

So when my life and the possibility of free confectionary is at stake, I am unable to justify eating that egg to myself. I think about eating it, but then I picture a frail, unfamous me curled up in the bush screaming in despair because I wasted my salvation on frivolity. A few minutes of pleasure is not worth starving in bushland. Nothing tastes as good as being interviewed on breakfast television feels, so the saying goes.

But no matter how iron-clad my reasoning for saving the egg, each year that foil-wrapped ball of calories and dreams taunts me. It doesn’t have eyes, or a face or even a brain, but somehow it manages to manipulate me, invading my thoughts until I am swallowed by madness. This tiny confection toys with me, tempting me to give in. Even after months have passed and it has melted and re-solidified more times than Donald Trump’s face, it is still a seductive minx making me abandon my good judgement. I imagine this was how Jesus felt during those 40 days and nights in the desert with the devil – it couldn’t be far off.

Each day I go without eating the egg only builds my resolve, as I tell myself that giving in would render the time I was able to abstain a waste. The longer I go without it, the more I feel I have stood up to the pressures of evil. My resolve becomes my only endearing quality, and my entire self-worth becomes wrapped up in my ability not to eat a powdery 17-month-old sweet. And when you’ve reached a point where your integrity is based solely on resisting ingesting a potentially harmful treat, you’re obviously too fragile to deal with the shame associated with giving in. I’m usually self aware enough to know that my psyche is delicate, but irrational enough to see the only solution as continuing that behaviour. It becomes a vicious cycle that is only broken when the egg finally disintegrates into powdery clumps, signalling that the chocolate is no longer safe to consume and freeing my soul from its cage of caution.

Unfortunately, Cadbury create quality chocolate products (it’s never to early to prepare for a sponsored post) so this process can take many months. I’m in for a gruelling few months.

I’m at a stage in my life where I have high thread count sheets, but also have a bottle of Trevi chilling in the fridge.

It’s a transitional period. I’m finding myself, yet I am building my career. This means I get to be a hot mess*, but also have expensive towels. It’s an interesting time in a female person’s life, which is probably why it’s often fodder for television series. There are so many hijinks to be had – will she date someone obsessed with public fornication? Will she have a career crisis that can only repaired by an honest but humorous monologue about convenient experience she had that week? Will she finally fall in love with the hopelessly attractive but vaguely detestable man introduced to the show in the first episode?

Again, this all comes down to my hallucination that my life is a television series. Unfortunately, it’s not – well not yet, but hopefully somebody from Hulu will stumble across my little blog and realise the deluded musings of an everyday Australian girl are exactly what modern television is missing. I lead an everyday life with no apparent narrative arc other than my continued existence – and considering my Saturday night involves just me, my laptop and a comfy oversized jumper, I would say that narrative arc bears a closer resemblance to a flatlining heart monitor.

Because my life is an actual life and not an idealised representation of what a roomful of writers thinks the existence of middle class woman should be, there is no underlying theme of my experiences. What happens to me everyday has nothing to do with, for example, modern relationships or the empowerment of women or even power struggles within elite law firms.

Now that that’s cleared up, back to the amusing juxtapositions of my life.

I’m at a stage where there are a lot of age appropriate douple-ups. Where I’m at now is essentially the vaginal-opening-shaped portion of a Venn diagram where the circle of Young Adult and Responsible Adult overlap. Call me Malcolm, because I’m in the middle.

Clearly I should have put “legitimate-looking handwriting” in the Responsible Adult circle. 

But unlike childhood when being in the middle meant you were the overlooked Jan, being in the middle as an “adult” means you have a bit of power. It means you get to be chosey, and pick at aspects of your age like the Sizzler salad bar. Sometimes, what you pick up with the standardised tongs is delicious, other times it can be laced with poison because of a disgruntled worker. That’s life.

So I get to choose a few dishes from the Responsible Adult bar – having a business card, regular pap smears, sometimes wearing work-appropriate heels to the office. But because of my mid-twenties status, I’m also able to load my plate up with Young Adult treats such as double fisting free champagne and wearing a long shirt as a dress even though bending shows off my undies.

Unfortunately this mid-status equates to only paying for the salad bar option at the counter, which means there are some things you miss out on. Sure, you’re able to access all the potato skins you want but when the waiter drops off the steak someone ordered at your table, you can’t help but wish you had committed to a main meal of your own.

Now, let me stop you right there. I remind you that my life isn’t yet a popular television series about a successful, adorably eccentric lass looking for a life partner. And I’m in no way equating a life partner to a well-cooked hunk of steak. I’m not yearning for piece of steak of my own, daydreaming about a slab of meat I can pour gravy over – although now I am wondering if anyone has ever done that as a way to spice things up. What I am saying is that, should you be expected to join someone else’s table, it would be nice to be able to refer to that steak and tell them “I can’t, I’m already full”.

That’s right. I’m taking about excuses no one questions which only applies to couples. Say what you will about committed relationships, they always offer an out for just about anything. Got a dull social obligation that wouldn’t be worth the smears of foundation required to look presentable for? Your life partner has a sporting thing they need your support for. Asked to sign up for an optional work training day over a weekend? Romantic interest is getting their wisdom teeth out and need you wipe away their drool. Facing a sweaty, unpleasant extended family Christmas dinner you would rather catch headlice than attend? Significant other has already told their family you’re spending the holiday with them. Relationships give you the obligation-cancelling power of claiming a case of diarrhoea of biblical proportions, while pining the disgust on someone else. You’re able to lie about deaths, but because you’re getting out of something due to the fictional heart attack of your partner’s stepdad’s mother you don’t have to worry about jinxing your own family members. It’s an ultimate free pass of excuses, and I don’t like not having that for myself. What I need is someone who I can blame for not being able to do stuff I don’t want to do without being obliged to do stuff I don’t want to do.   Because unfortunately, sometimes having a piece of steak is the only thing that can excuse you from doing something you just don’t feel like. You may already have a lot on your plate, but the potato skins you gorged yourself on from the Young Adult bar isn’t accepted as filling. People assume that not only can you fit more in, but you’re actually hungry for something more. Two soup bowls of pasta, several helpings of cheesy bread and a token effort at the salads will never be seen as as substantial as a steak dinner. You could have three carefully curated pre-dinner desserts (one which isapple crumble centred, one chocolate overload and the other purely ice cream based) and people would still think you’re compensating for a steak no matter how creative each bowl was. Unfortunately, that’s the world we still live in: a world in which potato skins aren’t good enough.

And, just so we’re clear, I’m talking about metaphorical potato skins. Literal potato skins will fill every bastard up.

*So I didn’t realise that hot mess was an all-bad thing. I used to think it was some kind of super sexy former child star who has a shitty car, is sexually irresponsible and can hold her piss like a team of reserve-grade rugby league players – they care less about their on-field performance and have an inferiority complex on account of not being good enough for A grade so these guys know how to party – all while having an unexplainably banging rig and somehow kills it at their job. When someone says “hot mess” I think of Amy Schumer’s character in Trainwreck before the conventions of romantic comedies forced her to turn her life around and submit to the whims of a man and the ideals of society. So I used to like to refer to myself as one of these people until I found out that “hot mess” is essentially the human equivalent of a wheelie bin in the hot summer sun on the first bin day of the year – yeah, Christmas AND New Years, which means prawn heads, beer-soaked paper towels and those devilled eggs the neighbours insist on giving you which were leftover from the party you took them to as your contribution to the nibblies. That stinks guys. Apparently “hot mess” is someone with a shitty car, sexually irresponsible, drinks a lot and looks like death whose boss is searching for excuses to fire them without being open to a Fair Work prosecution.

Earlier this weekend I considered signing up for a mentoring program. My old college put out a call for alumnae to sign up to help third year students make that giant leap from smelling of day-old goon and wearing ruggers to lectures to being an actual professional looking employee. The brief said it didn’t matter what level in our careers we were at – any help was good help.

Maybe it’s the narcissistic show pony in me, but something pushed me to sign up for it. Sure, it might be a littler extra work but it also would mean a steady supply of admiration coming my way. The Idealist In Me said “you have so much to offer a supple, young student” and I went to click the link to sign up with grand visions of me, wearing a blazer and stylish but practical shoes leading some empowered-looking young ladies into some kind of celestial board room. Together we would take out our sledgehammers and smash the glass ceiling before turning and posing at a non-existent camera like the opening credits of a local news broadcast.

But then The Realist Inside Me started screaming, kicked in a plaster wall in and began dragging The Idealist In Me away from the “click the link” button face down by her hair so her teeth ground down to bloody stumps on coarse cement while swearing like a sailor. Think Inside Out meets Happy Tree Friends and you have an accurate representation of what was happening inside my head. This was a contentious idea.

The Realist Inside Me demanded I list a few concrete examples of what exactly I could offer a supple, young student. But before I could come up with that, the little bastard began listing examples of how I could significantly screw up a fresh mind. And I had to agree that some of these didn’t bode well for mentoring magic.

I’ve dealt with a few work experience kids in my time, and some of those outcomes were not ideal. I once got into a tense standoff with a high schooler over the difference between similes and metaphors (I know my poetic devices, don’t fuck with me). I also coerced the kid to watch Billy Maddison after Adam Sandler talk got all too real. I freaked him out by baking him a going away cake from scratch, complete with a terrifyingly bad icing drawing of an alligator (because writing out “see you later alligator” was impractical).

I’m also reasonably terrible at introductions. In fact, I would use the word appalling. Here’s an example of how I introduced myself to a uni student we took on as a short-term intern:

Me: I’m Dannielle aaaand I am …. wearing a yellow skirt.

Editor: This is Dannielle. She’s our senior journalist.

Me: Hey.

If you think that’s bad, here’s an actual transcript of my introduction to one of the country’s most prominent politicians. I anticipated it was going to be touch and go, so I baked one of my mother’s fruitcakes to take along as a buffer to conversational stumblings. Upon reflection, I’m glad for my fruity foresight:

Me: If there’s an awkward silence get into the fruitcake.

Disclaimer, I’m not great at small talk – I once started a conversation asking a guy if he had ever got a chicken wing stuck in his beard.

One of The Country’s Most Prominent Politicians: …

(awkward silence)

Me: Let’s get into the questions.

That’s not something a lamb of a journalist needs to be exposed to. That’s not something anyone wanting to not appear as an unmistakable imbecile should be exposed to.

Now The Realist Inside Me is getting louder. She’s yelling about my childlike insistence that the office tissue box feature Frozen characters. She’s bringing up that time I worked yanking a newborn calf out of its mother into an intro about spring. She’s raving about my most ironic typo (to date, anyway) when I wrote “education” without the “a”. With a track record like that, what could I possibly teach an emerging professional without rendering them unemployable?

In a final blow, The Realist Inside Me goes through my phone records for evidence of my lack of qualification to give life advice to a vulnerable young’un. Perhaps my inaptitude to provide sounds guidance on the path to success can be summed up in one text, sent from the Laundromat, which I go to because I don’t own a working washing machine:

I just got really excited because when I put my washing on, I changed be machine setting to a cook wash and it knocked a dollar off the price!

Things are finally looking up!

It’s about as impressive as a screen door. The pathetic optimism attached to the meagre saving does not exactly denote an example worth following. I’m about to give in.

But then, after spitting out a mouthful of blood and tooth shards, The Idealist In Me speaks up. It’s a bit muffled, but she chimes in with something only the glass half full kind of person would say: “if you’ve pulled that kind of shit and you still manage to be employed, you must be doing something right”.

And while her swollen face is distracting, her message is clear: sometimes you have to measure success not in wealth, rank or accomplishment, but with how much you’ve been able to get away with. And despite all your major cock ups and irrefutable character flaws, you have to remind yourself that, so far, you have avoided being thrown into a hessian sack and tossed into the sea like a litter of unwanted kittens. Maybe, you aren’t an intolerable bucket of disappointment. And maybe someone can learn from that.

Before The Realist Inside Me can make a rebuttal, The Idealist In Me makes a dive for the “click the link” button and I’m signing up for the program. I might not be the best example in the world, but I’m also hoping I have something to give as well. I may wear a pony belt to work most days, but at least I go there. Most of the time, I’m also wearing shoes. And if nothing else answers the question of whether I would be a competent mentor, I’ll leave them with this last question on the online form:

Is there anything extra you would like to add/offer when putting you in touch with the student you will be mentoring?

I have a business card, you know.

For those of you playing along at home/keeping up with my blog as a way of reminding yourself that your life could be worse, my car wasn’t in great shape last week.

Long story short, it was sitting unused, taped together in my garage for the weekend and it needed attention from someone with more qualifications than being competent at using a hot glue gun to make it legal to drive again. After explaining to my co-workers my predicament, I had roped in the only male-type person in our department to make calls on my behalf so to avoid the mysterious uterus surcharge that sometimes makes its way on to an invoice statement. The Man-Sounding Voiced Colleague kindly obliged and gave the wreckers staff my brief which is best described as: “mate, I don’t care how it bloody looks, just as long as it’s road worthy”. After this, Man-Sounding Voiced Colleague has since tried to tell me to get a new car. Which I balked at for a number of reasons:

Reason Number One: The sole purpose of a car is for transportation needs. My chariot is still able to ferry me and my perpetually over-packed overnight bag from A to B so it still fulfils its purpose.

Sure, it doesn’t exactly look brand new. The ceiling of the car is held up with thumbtacks. There’s a weird brownish smattering of gunk on the inside of the door that I can’t explain. The bonnet has so much hail damage it looks like cellulite. It’s missing a hubcap.

But while there may be some exterior imperfections and the occasional quirk in the mechanics, it still manages to get where it’s going. My mechanic George tells me it’s the best advertisement for Toyota that could ever be created. Throwing something away when it still does what its supposed to do wasteful, and it this kind of throwaway, keep up with the Joneses culture that is going to be our country’s undoing one day.

Reason Number Two: There’s a girl with the same car as me (right down to the 300,000 plus mileage and the missing hubcap) and I am determined for mine to outlast its rival. I thirst for the day my vehicle stands over her car’s decomposing body as it is lowered into the ground like a scene from Pretty Little Liars. My sensible family mover is A.

Reason Number Three: I’m quite poor. I’m in no state to be making financial commitments – I put chicken nuggets on my credit card last week.

Reason Number Four: Even if I had a sackful of dollars, I’d be wanting to trade that currency for more chicken nuggets. I’m not wasting hard-earned nugg-dollars on buying a car when I already have a working one in my asset portfolio – it’s called economic sense.

Reason Number Five: I have formed a strong emotional bond with this lifeless object, and after being scarred by what can happen to disused machines in The Brave Little Toaster as a child, I’m not about to let that happen to one of my oldest friends. They say that if a friendship reaches the seven-year mark, you’re friends for life. I’ve had this car for nearly eight years, so it should technically be a candidate for one of my bridesmaids by now. It’s so intertwined in my life, it made it into my Year 12 yearbook:

*

I’ve been through a lot with my slightly dented metallic mate. There was that time we accidentally sped into raging flood waters and were nearly swept away; a lighter, sportier car would have been literally up the creek but my heavyset lady’s big bones weighted us down and by some miracle allowed the tyres enough traction to take us to safety (note: if it’s flooded, forget it). There was that time I needed an impromptu platform to dance on for a friend’s video; a smaller model would have crumpled under my intensive thrust work, but the wide roof provided the perfect podium for my powerful gyrations. It may have the roof held up by thumbtacks, but it has a boot big enough to support my borderline hoarding insistence of having a swag, a tent, a beach cricket set and half a carto of Tooeys on me at all times – just in case of an emergency. This emergency situation crept up on me before, when My Curly Haired Friend and I went on a day trip and found ourselves stranded on top of a mountain with nothing but warm tinnies for dinner. When it got too cold to hang out in the tent, we drank within the warmth of my noble steed and things got … emotional. Some would say the stinking hot piss we were sinking loosened our lips, but I like to think our raw, tear-soaked heart-to-heart crying-so-hard-snot-comes-out session was encouraged and nurtured by the innards of my fraying interior like the flabby arms of a kind grandmother.

My car has been a boat, a bed, an esky, a go-go dancer stage, a campsite bar, a Splendour mule, a portable wardrobe, a literal shelter from the storm, a metallic blue feelings container and a reliable friend for nearly eight years – I can’t just let all that go because it needed a little cosmetic surgery.

I started to explain this to my Man-Sounding Voiced Colleague but by the time I got halfway through explaining my first reason, his head was shaking and he was reaching for his headphones.

Apparently there is a shorter way of explaining my decision making process, and that is simply saying “I don’t want to”. But that kind of caper would make for a very dull blog post.

*The chocolate smear did eventually come off the back seat. Now I can walk into my 10 year reunion with my held held high! 

Nah yeah: Having actual plans on a Tuesday night to get exited about. 

Instead of sitting at home and re-watching When Harry Met Sally or playing with my favourite new website faceinhole.com (that is literally what it is – you make a hole to put people’s faces in. I did it with a pastry plan and the Home Alone movie poster on the weekend and, despite getting very few likes, it was fantastic). 

I had actual plans instead. With another person. Just look at these excited texts that were exchanged: 

Actual Person: Let me know when you’re on your way!!

Me: Woooo! 

I am just having a cup of tea, and then it’s pants and Coles.

I’m so excited.

Good God.

Yeah nah: The excuted texts were about me buying a bag of frozen onion rings. Heating up the frozen onions and eating them. The whole bag.