I’m too snotty to make sense of things right now.

I’m not completely choked up with phlegm, but I’m fluey enough to know that can’t be trusted to coherently string a full blog post together right now. There’s no way I can find higher meaning in anything when I’m in this state. I just kind of look around with lazy, squinty eyes and repeatedly opening my mouth in a way that tries to pop my ears. This makes look like a goldfish on Valium.

So instead of trying to produce a polished, well-written parable (yes, that is how I would describe my previous posts), I’m just going to list the things that happened to me this week. Because while I am sick, I am not so sick that I can ignore my to do list, and writing this post has been a looming “to do” that hasn’t yet been did.

These are like three mini adventures to tied you over until I’m well enough to appear mentally unwell again. It’s like those Little Treehouse of Horrors episodes of The Simpsons that have three stories to it, except pathetic instead of scary.

Today I got the new iPhone. I also finally when out and bought two new pillows for my bed. When I moved here, my sister’s boyfriend kindly brought a bunch of my possessions in the back of his ute which was loaded in my absence. As such, only half of my pillows were loaded on. And as a fun twist of fate, my two worst pillows were brought interstate. So for the last few weeks I’ve been sleeping on dust-mite-ridden sacks of mouldy disappointment. It didn’t make for a great night’s sleep but it also made me look chronically single having just two pillows on a queen bed (I mean, I am chronically single, which is fine, but no one wants to look chronically single. Being chronically single and looking chronically single are horses of very different colours. One is a classy yet carefree gal who knows what she wants and the other is a crying mess wearing a stained singlet eating cold baked beans straight out of the tin. Don’t be the bean-eating mess). Today I finally snapped and bought two new pillows.

I walked into the homewears shop hoping I wouldn’t pay an arm and a leg for pillows, because the nearest store selling pillows is one of those stores with classy middle-aged women as the shop assistants. And these women have expensive fruit bowl habits to support so their stores are always slightly higher in price range. Thankfully, I was wearing my “active wear” when I walked in, which included a pair of college merch ruggers I’ve worn on every jog and gym session for the past five years with the thighs worn out of them so I looked poor enough that the lady who served me didn’t bother trying to upsell the pillows. Sometimes being poor has its advantages.

Anyway, long story short is that I was more excited about the pillows than the new phone. What does that say about me?

Today I went running with very oily hair and smelled like a snack food. Let me unpack this further. I read somewhere that it’s good to work a bit of olive oil through your hair as a natural conditioning treatment, and when I was roasting some veggies for this week’s lunches, I used a bit of olive juice in my locks while I had it out. You see, my hair hasn’t been cut in about a year and I’m looking very much like that girl who was trapped down a well so I thought I’d give it a crack. About half an hour after I rubbed the oil in (which was a weirdly satisfying job, I must say) I decided that I should take my sloppy rig out for a spin and didn’t see a point in washing the oil out of my hair only to have to wash it again after running.

Now, I’ve been a little slack on the jogging front lately so I became fairly hot rather quickly, particularly in the cranial region – with all that hair on my head, it’s a bit like running with a woollen jumper on. Bear Grylls could survive for three days off the sweat that collects in my hair when I exercise. My head juices infused with the olive oil, which was heating up thanks to my sweaty scalp. Together they released a smell that was kind of like a deep fryer mixed with the stale head odour you have the morning after a big night. Basically, it was like Smiths chips released a special edition dandruff-flavoured chippie. I’m not ashamed to say that it made me hungry.

** Update: I tweeted about this experience and received two likes and a retweet. I’m hoping it goes viral so Smiths will actually make my chip flavour suggestion seriously or a shampoo company will send me free products. Either outcome would be welcomed.

Earlier in the week I ate the chocolate of a stranger. I moved into this place about a month ago. I didn’t need to bring a bed because the guy living in the room before me is leaving it behind. That bed actually belonged to the guy who lived in the room before he did. This bed has been here a while (but don’t worry, I have a mattress topper so I can lie to myself that I’m not actually sleeping on a bed of the dead skin cells of strangers).

Ok, now that you have that information, consider this: Last week I found an Easter egg under the bed and I ate it.

That egg had potentially been there for two years.

It could have been laced with poison.

It could have been used in some weird sex ritual.

It could have been planted there by a cruel practical joke reality show with hidden cameras set up in my room to capture my shame and broadcast it to the would.

And I ate it.

I was in a dark place this week.

Published in On Our Selection News, November 3, 2016

I spent my first Saturday night in Sydney tweeting at Whoopi Goldberg.

To be fair, that first sentence made it sound like I was in a conversation with the shoe-loving presenter on The View who filled my childhood with song. I wasn’t. I tweeted at her while watching a back-to-back Sister Act special on television. It was glorious, obviously. The habits; the jazzy choir numbers; the wholesome fun dotted with a few spicy jokes. It’s all brilliant and I wanted Whoopi to know that. So I did what any attention-seeking homebody with access to the Internet would do: I tweeted at her.

And I like to think that if I were an already-established person of interest, we would have had a lovely online exchange that some smutty tabloid could have written about with a headline going something along the lines of “DMags [in my mind, the press would see me as a slightly bogan Jennifer Lawson/J-Law] shows us once again why she is the celeb we’d most like to have a sleepover with – and wins over Whoopi Goldberg in the process!”.

But let’s be honest here, there’s no way someone like Whoopi was ever going to respond to me. She was probably out doing cool stuff, and understandably ignored me like the lowly person that I am.

In fact, if you look through my last few tweets, you’d understand why the woman who had a brief cameo the 1994 family motion picture Little Rascals didn’t respond to me.

As a young media professional (yes, I’m calling myself a media professional because this column is nothing if not professional) I really need to work on building my online presence. You know, getting likes on my Instagram pictures and building an army of followers on Twitter. Twitter is that social media platform that lets you post your opinions in 140 letters or less. This can be anything from your disgust about the state of politics, or think your thoughts are important, when we all know they are worthless trash.

Twitter great because the only people who use it are celebrities, trolls and budding journos trying to build their profiles. And if you’re a budding journo trying to build your profile, you’re not famous enough to get attention from trolls and the fame-hungry twitter users like yourself tend to favourite your tweets to trick you into reciprocating. This means your real friends usually miss out on your cringe-worthy attempts for attention. But a sad consequence is that the celebrities you desperately try to contact rarely respond.

And maybe it’s a good thing the celebrities don’t look at my tweets, because they don’t make me look like the most fun or emotionally-stable person on the planet.

Here’s my bottom three tweets:

“You know you need a sleep in when you’re crying to 60 Minute Makeover.”

“Woke up hangover-free as my neighbourhood is too fancy to stock the only red wine cordial-y enough for me to drink.”

“Aaaaand I just teared up over a bread ad on TV.”

I guess I’m going to have to work on changing my image. Or go on a Tweet deleting rampage.

Published in On Our Selection News, October 27, 2016

Blackouts make for a dark time.

Losing power during a storm has a lot of negative consequences some trivial (not being able to see in the dark) and some not so trivial (not being able to charge your phone).

Take, for example, refrigeration. I have a very strong memory of our freezer dripping with blood after a blackout like something from a low-budget remake of The Shining.

We had recently bought half beast – no doubt thanks to the incredible bargain sniffing of my father – and the power was out for far too long. Kilos of meat thawed, got warm and oozed out their thick, red juices. It was pretty devastating, especially so for my mother who is practically a carnivore with glasses – she has been known to gnaw on bones and I once caught her eating raw mince. It obviously hit the family hard because someone thought it significant enough to take a photo of this bloody freezer (and this was back in the day when you had to take your film into the chemist and have it developed). It might have been taken for insurance purposes, but we still have it for some reason. If you riffle through the Maguire Phamily Photos you’ll eventually come across this confusing image which would no doubt raise suspicions if the Criminal Minds team unearthed it.

Blackouts are inconvenient, kind of creepy and make it very difficult to shower. And because the first person to walk away from the group during a blackout in a horror movie is the first one to have their spleen ripped from their body, power outages usually result in whole families gathering in one room. And herding several stressed, scared and slightly smelly people into a confined space doesn’t sound like a good idea.

But (and I say this with full access to electricity) there’s something kind of nice about the power going out. Because the Internet modem is off, videos of Sister Act choir performances you planned on spending your night watching take too long to buffer and you end up putting down the phone and breaking out a deck of cards with the family.

And depending on how many siblings are currently sponging off our parents, this can get quite loud. I would probably describe the sound that comes from our house as a cacophony  – which, incidentally, is the collective noun for cockatoos.

People say that getting away from technology is a good thing because once we disconnect with the Facebooks and the Instygrammers, we start connecting with each other. But in our case, being glued to screens is really an act of maintaining a peaceful society.

Because when left to our own devices, we revert back to our childhood selves. One of my sisters will ask penetratingly personal questions, another will start talking over someone, another will start talking over everyone to rouse on the person who was talking over someone, I’ll overshare, mum will say something laced with innuendo (sometimes wittingly, other times accidentally) and my father will have a mini aneurism. It’s great fun.

When I say blackouts are dark times, I mean so more for the neighbours – who can’t turn on the radio to drown out the noise.

The other night I had an uplifting experience, and it only cost me $37.50.

I paid to go along to Matt Groening’s talk at Graphic 2016. I had the option to buy a $37.50 seat or a $137.50 seat, and was happy to take a gamble on the restricted view. Oh boy did it pay off. I was in the front row of the box at the side of the stage, and while I had a side view of his face I was so close I could have thrown a ball of paper at said face (which is saying something, because I have a terrible throw).

It was pretty exciting sitting just a few metres away from the man who is responsible for an estimated 37 per cent of my communication (a further 20 per cent comes from Gilmore Girls, 2 per cent from Olsen Twins movies, 13 per cent from Cougar Town and 4 per cent from Drop Dead Gorgeous and 2 per cent from Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead – the rest is somewhat organic material, but I would say at least half of this final percentile comes from movies or shows that fall into the “other” category). This was a huge deal.

His talk was phenomenal. It was funny, it was insightful and it featured my favourite Instagram account @thesimpsonstattoo, which is a collation of all the great and so-not-great-that-it’s-great permanent odes to America’s favourite yellow family.

I walked out of the theatre feeling entirely inflated, despite the fact that I didn’t have in my hands a signed original drawing like a few lucky others did.

This feeling of elation was quite remarkable, as I’m feeling a little uninspired at the moment (even buying shoes or reading Oh, The Places You’ll Go can’t really get me out of my funk, which is frustrating because years of television exposure has led me to believe that these activities are somewhat cathartic). I’m tired, irritable and can’t really see where my life is heading as I tunnel blindly into the darkness and decay – I’m like a grumpy earthworm. 

So I’m going to do what I always tend to do in a crisis instead of seeking professional help like a sensible person – I’m going to attach meaning to a recent encounter and delude myself that cosmic timing made me hear what I needed to hear, and saw what I needed to see. I have a troubling way of thinking that Fate is heavily involved in my life to the point of obsessive stalking, while also questioning whether Fate can really give a fuck about a middle-class white girl’s minor affairs when there’s shit like Syria’s civil unrest going down. I can never be sure, but maybe Fate just has one of those universal remotes and is flicking between whatever’s happening with me, and the actual great injustices of the world.

Existential crises aside, it is also fun from a writing point of view to apply the great lessons of lives lived before us to our own inconsequential existences. 

After showing us his father’s home movies, clips from the show and revealing how he came up with his characters (Milhouse, incidentally, was only created so Bart would have someone to talk to in a Butterfingers commercial. I’ve alluded to this fact before and will so again, but thank the heavens for commercialism and advertising) Groening ended his talk with a couple of words of advice for us audience members.They were offered kindly and in good faith, so I’m going to do what I do with any gift – pick them apart and pass judgement on them.

Box up your favourite childhood items and don’t let your parents throw it away

He said things like comic books and figurines and such, but I didn’t really have comic books, and I ensure that my Harry Potter figurines are with me at all times.

So this is a lesson I don’t really need.

There are a few things I had stowed away before flying the coop and, thankfully, my parents haven’t thrown too much out. That’s because one time Mum got rid of my toothbrush and frayed trackpants that were part of the “old uniform” during our high school’s wardrobe update (and at that time, the old uniform was waaay cooler. Our school was an odd place where dressing shabbily and purely for comfort was trendy. Only the losers dressed up to look nice on a free dress day, but if you wore trackies you were a legend) and I never let her forget how much the thoughtless toss wounded me. So now my mother is terrified of throwing anything away without my permission. It helps that I come from a line of hoarders: my 20-canvas artwork from Year 10 is still in our storeroom for this reason. Unfortunately, this hoarding doesn’t come by the way of posters, something I learnt the hard way when I came back from uni to find the picture of Hugh Grant fondling a woman’s bottom with a speech bubble in a foreign langue has been ripped from my old bedroom’s wall. And I’m not sure that this was really what Groening had in mind when he distilled this advice.

Finish your projects

He mentioned cartoons and scripts and even an unfinished novel in his drawers just sitting there.

This is one I could do with reminding myself of. It’s illustrated by the stacks of half-read books in the corner of my room and the dozens of Microsoft Word documents I have saved to my desktop of things I’ve started to write, then abandoned.

But I reckon this applies to anything. If you’ve started something and then run out of steam do what you have to do to get back on track. Take a break, go for a nap, do some star jumps and then get straight back into it. Because completing something feels great. Ticking off the to do list is like doing crack off a businessman’s chiselled abs (something I don’t have any experience with as I actually don’t really know what crack is or how it finds its way into the bloodstream, as you might be able to tell, but go with it) or putting that last piece into an increasingly difficult puzzle (something I DO know about, thank you very much). It’s magical, satisfying and makes you strut, just a little bit. So if you’ve already started that squat track, you may as well get to the end. You should always finish what you start in life, whether that’s a book or a beer. Get it done.

Don’t save your ideas for another day – more will come to you. Go with those ideas now!

I’m sure this was purely in relation to the creative process, but I think the premise can be applied to other things in life, much like the previous rule.

Act on your ideas! Do it now! Seize the day!

This is all very positive, but let’s not blindly ignore the undertone here. I take this ultimately as warning you one of two things: you will either forget your fantastic idea because you are living with early-onset dementia and your idea will be lost forever; or do it now before you die, because your demise is coming for you and coming for you fast. Life is fleeting and you will soon be in the dark, soupy swamp of the unknown. Everyone you know is going to die and soon your soul will flake away from this earth and everything you ever thought will disappear and become meaningless. 

Don’t let your critics stop you from creating

This is supposed to tell you to keep drawing/writing/creating even when people tell you it’s a waste of time. Even when they put you down. Even when they tell you you’re never going to make money with your pathetic craft.

And it does.

However, this rule only applies if you actually have talent. I mean, if you’re good at whatever creative thing you’re putting your mind to, tell those naggy bastards to shove it. Because they don’t know anything and you’re going to go on to create a multi-million dollar television series. These critics are not your friends, but are great, sloppy shits who seek only to bring you down to their shitty level by smothering you in excrement. Don’t let them smear you.

But if you’re actually quite shit, maybe your critics are trying to help. In which case, maybe you should listen to them. If what you’re creating is cringeworthy or looks like a drunk two-year-old drew it using their toes, then it’s best that your utter shitness is brought to your attention.

You can either give up and spend your time on a more profitable pursuit – like running a nursing home, which will make you millions thanks to the rapidly aging population – or getting better at it.

So, this rule can be translated to two things: don’t be friends with shits and don’t be shit. I prefer a combination of both.

Look for the hell yeah moments in life – have as many of those as possible

This is one I can really learn from.

Because these days my idea of living large is having a second bowl of All Bran. I mean, I love the taste and texture of All Bran, and I love the idea of using fibre to speed up the digestive process and I bloody love a good, cold milk. But this isn’t even considered an exciting cereal. And going for a second helping of the stuff was the most exciting thing I did with my Sunday. I don’t want the highlight of my life to be a fibre-rich cereal. I want it to at least have a few nuts or even some dried apricots, you know?

Bu then, you also don’t want to be something sweet and colourful like Fruit Loops ether. Because while it may charm you with it’s sugary taste and rainbow of colours, it is devoid of any real nutritional substance. The colours are artificial. The sweeteners are artificial. Your happiness is artificial.

No, it’s best to be a nice, decadent muesli.

Good grief, I’m comparing life to cereal. I am boring. 19-year-old Dannielle must be furious.

So there you have it! Follow these rules and you might continue living a mediocre existence until the weight of your failed attempts at success crushes you into a pancake of disappointment. But you also may possibly become the greatest thing to happen to pop culture who doesn’t start with a K.

Originally published in On Our Selection News October 20, 2016

I’m off for a stint in the big Steak and Kidney and I have to say I’m interested in how this is going to go.

In case my use of the term “Steak and Kidney” didn’t make it clear, I’m not really the most sophisticated of people. I’m not entirely sure how I’m going to fit in, but I am glad that the bogan twang seems to be a bit of a trend these days. 

I like to think I strike a charming balance between small town bogan and round-glasses-wearing cynicism. I feel like I could be the novelty among our inner-city countrymen, reconnecting them to that Australian spirit they all pretend to have on Australia Day. I can imagine them looking at me like a Mick Dundee character, and I’ll enjoy playing up to it.

I’ll tell them about how we used to have to do line dancing as our morning exercise in school and about the horse that is allowed into the pub on St Patrick’s Day and they’ll think I’m some kind of Australian legend. I fully expect this yarn spinning will result in a lot of free beer.

Heading to the big smoke is exciting, but I have to say that my views on Sydney are indifferent at best.

For starters, Sydney is the only place in Australia you see being mucked up on disaster movies. When a comet ploughs into the earth, Sydney bloody cops it. If there is some kind of world domination plot, Sydney is the place the baddies launch their attack in Australia. It’s the first place the aliens would hit first if they wanted to invade our country.

If a global emergency strikes, I reckon I’d have a much better chance for survival in Queensland. Because no one in their right mind would want to destroy a place where an iconic bottle tree was filled with cement to keep it alive (it’s my number one tourist destination for when I bring visitors home).

Plus, there are much less people out here and most of them have at least one vehicle suited to off-road conditions. So if we did have to get out of the path of alien spacecraft quickly, there wouldn’t be a traffic jam, nor would there be people trying to navigate the bush in a two-seater smart car that looks like a high-tech esky.

I’m also concerned about the coffee culture of the place. It seems to be very much geared to the grab-and-go caffeine fix, whereas I like to stop and have a pot of tea. I like the idea of coffee – something that gives you energy and makes you poo quicker and means you get to pretend to be early -2000s Paris Hilton while walking around with a Starbucks cup. Loving coffee is the ultimate mark of being a grown up. It can tell the world how busy and important and goddamned fancy you are without saying a word. I love being busy and important and goddamned fancy. But I really don’t like it all that much. Plus I really don’t want to get to a point where I need coffee, and start telling people how much “I need my morning coffee, LOL.” People who repeatedly tell the world how much they “just need a coffee” need to have something stronger, like rat poison. And at this point, any type of coffee will do – even that powdered stuff that looks like Milo but most definitely isn’t Milo. Because there’s nothing more depressing than the highlight of a middle-aged person’s day being a cup of instant coffee in the scummy staff room. 

I chose to stick with tea, not only because it makes me alternative but traditional, but also because it’s reasonably cheap. Unless you go to a cafe. At a cafe, you’ll be charged for a tea at a similar price as a coffee. And it’s basically a fucking teabag.  I have nothing against teabags, in fact I use them almost exclusively behind closed doors, but if I’m out it’s hard to justify paying three or four bucks for a teabag, hot water and a disposable cup that’s going straight to landfill. If I’m paying $3.50 for a teabag, it better have more than tea in it. 

And then there’s the issue of daylight savings. Everyone in New South Wales seems to love it, but to me it’s just an entire state living in delusion and attempting to play god by changing the fabric of time. Being an hour ahead means readjusting your body clock and makes it mighty annoying to call Mum and Dad at a convenient time. And with so much happening in the big smoke, I suspect I’ll have a lot to say when I check in with back home. Stay tuned.