Yeah nah: I paid $9 for a box of bandaids today. NINE BUCKS. That’s at leat five bags of carrots or three beers during happy hour at my favourite bar in Sydney (it serves pizza and you had the most interesting reading material in the ladies bathroom cubicles).

Obscene.

I made the mistake of assuming I was carrying this morning, because when it comes to bandaids I am always packin’. My foot skin, and skin in general, is very soft, which is one of those BS feminine traits that are glorified in fairytales/adverts featuring Jennifer Aniston (no offence to Jen, her life is amazing). This would be great if you spend your life as a delicate princess/traipsing around barefoot between yoga and paddle boarding and verbally being fabulous, but not when you have to walk ten minutes each way to the train station. Yes. You HAVE heard me complain about this before. And I daresay this won’t be the last time I rally against the soft foot movement.

Because rough feet make for less blisters, and should be celebrated.

Unfortch I’m a little on the softer side and am quite prone to yellowish skin bubbles of serum forming on my feet. So I generally have at least two bandaids on me at all times. Even in my wallet.

But somehow I let myself run out without replenishing stocks.

And today, I had to make a dash for one of those corner stores that inflates prices astronomically in the name of convenience. They know they can get away with daylight robbery because people are either too lazy, too desperate or too drunk to travel further on to a store with reasonably-priced goods.

Today, I fell into the trap.

And I am livid.

Nah yeah: I saved $3 on honey. So maybe that cancels it out a little?

Yeah nah: Nope. Even with my honey saving, $6 for a pack of bandaids is still unacceptable.

Originally published in The Clifton Courier, July 12, 2017

I’m trying to become a better speller, and it’s not going well.

I know Year 7 Dannielle would be very disappointed in me. It’s been enough time between drinks (of cordial, obviously) so I don’t feel like it’s too braggy for me to say that she was generally around the top of her class when it came to spelling test Fridays. Granted, there were so few of us that you could technically be in the top 10 and the bottom 10 at the same time, but that doesn’t count.

The point is that Year 7 Dannielle liked to consider herself a bit of a wordsmith. When you take inflation (of my 12-year-old ego, that is) into account, this means that I was generally competent in the written word. Fractions weren’t my jam, but I did the words good.

Now, as a legitimate grown up I use phrases like “did the words good”. Yes, I used that particular phrase that for humorous purposes, but my misuse of the English language isn’t always intentionally ironic.

Thanks to the inclusion of a spellchecker in basically every computer program I use and autocorrect on my mobile, my spelling skills have declined a little. Because most of the writing I do is on a computer or on a smartphone, I have become used to these brilliant technological advancements, and it’s making me lazy.

The times I do write the traditional way – with pen and paper – are for very minor applications. Most of the time my handwriting is exercised in a letter to my sister, who doesn’t judge me for my mistakes. Other times it’s for shopping lists, when I’m the only one who sees it and, because I know perfectly well what “yog” and “strawbs” means, I rarely write out the full words anyway.

So most of the writing I do is done with the help of grammar applications.  And it’s making me lazy. I no longer have to know how many Cs are in “necessary” or whether the I comes before the E in “believe”. As long as I know the general gist of the word, most of the time the computer will work out what I’m trying to say and correct it for me.

This idea is great in theory, and super handy when you’re in a high-stress scenario such as smashing out a last-minute 2000-word essay. But over time this isn’t such a neato thing. After being out of practise of having to spell for myself for so long, I can feel myself regressing.

Sometimes I catch myself trying to spell “once” with a W. I try to put an I in “month”. The other day I caught myself trying to spell “wrong” with a U. And yes, I’m well aware of the irony in spelling the word “wrong” incorrectly.

So I’m trying to right my wrongs.

In an increasingly digital age, I’m doing my best to get back to the basics by literally crossing my Ts and dotting my Is.

But I work in the online sphere; I can’t not use computers. I don’t have a fax machine to send in this column every week, and I would need Mum to drastically increase the fruitcake drop-offs if someone at this fine newspaper had to both decipher and type out my hand-written drivel. I can’t change my reliance on computers.

But I can change the settings on my phone. So last week, I did just that. I turned autocorrect off, meaning I’m now flying solo when it comes to spelling. The red line comes up when I make an error, but it’s up to me to fix it. Already it’s making a difference. I urge you to give it a crack.

But be careful with what you write, especially on social media. The other day I was posting about the smell of the trains on Twitter, comparing them a lucky dip after pointing my observations that they sometimes smell like jelly crystals and sometimes smell like vomit. Unfortunately, I’d made a spelling error and didn’t proofread before I hit “tweet”.

About an hour later I had a notification on my phone from the train company asking me what a “licky dip” was.

I still maintain that this was spell check’s fault.

Has anyone seen that bank ad telling you to take out your phone at look at the last five photos?

You know it – it’s that soppy ad/attempt to encourage customers to forge emotional associations between themselves and a massive profit generating corporation. Because, let’s face it, banks never get a great wrap. It’s hard to think of a bank and not think of Dick Van Dyke* clawing after a young boy’s tuppence in a fake beard and old man make up. All we want to do is feed the birds, man.

The whole premise of the ad is based off the assumption that people are taking meaningful photos with their smartphones. And hey, maybe their target audience ARE taking meaningful photos on their smartphones. Because their target audience is generally made up of A) wealthy Baby Boomers who keep their phones in those card-holder-wallet-cases and take photos with them using with too hands or B) young families who are trying to build themselves a home – be that metaphorically or literally – who take a shitload of photos of their cute babies doing cute stuff or C) people who generally have their lives together.

I fall into neither of these categories.

And perhaps the last five photos on my phone can indicate as to why I am not the target audience for a banking ad.

Let’s do a little experiment, shall we?

The last photo I took was a screenshot of Facebook post showing a piggin’ cake that was made for someone’s 18^th. It is actually incredible. It’s this dark brown feral pig lying on its side in very realistic-looking dirt, which I imagine is a crunchy chocolate dream. The big has tusks (obvs) and yellow eyes and a big eff-off bloody fondant knife sticking out of its neck. It’s dripping in fake blood, it’s a little bit sick and it’s a lot bit marvellous.

This isn’t particularly telling in itself, but it indicates my tendency to follow the social media accounts of cake artists. I mean, this particular account is run by a girl from back home who I want to support. But the other accounts I follow on Instagram are run by strangers. So I’m really in it for the food porn. And the fact that I openly salivate over baked goods leads to impulsive decision-making that, in the heat of the moment, deems it perfectly reasonably to pay more than $5 for a doughnut.

Bakery Insty accounts are a gateway drug to financial frivolity and ruin.

The second last photo is actually a Snapchat I saved of me being extremely excited about the second-hand clothing I bought for an absolute barg from the Sydney Theatre Company’s garage sale (check out how cult-cha-ed I am now). I spent $12 and ended up with two shirts, a skirt, a cardigan and a novelty vase with some sweet gumnut detailing. You might argue that this is a financially-sound pursuit, because of the bargains. And you’re right. But my excitement – nay, elation – isn’t just rooted in saving money in general, but is a reaction to the need to save money to begin with. When you second-guess spending $15 on a winter coat, you have to wonder why you’re being so stingy. And judging from my above remark about impulse-buy doughnuts, you don’t really need to wonder.

Upon reflection, this indicates I’m investing my money in the wrong areas. Instead of practicality, like clothing, I pool my money into sugar-laden treats that will give me a few moments of delight before ending up in the sewer system.

The third photo is a screen shotted Snapchat of my parents on my Dad’s birthday, sent to me by my sister. Now, you might think that this is proving the banking ad correct, because there is that emotional attachment. However, when viewed after being coated with the obsesssve-self-reflective scrutiny fair dusty I often like to sprinkle around, this photo can be attached to more flippant financial thought-processes which see me randomly buy plane tickets back to Queensland on short notice. I get family-related FOMO pretty badly these days, leading me to book my tickets less than a month before flying, when they’re more expensive. And that may help the homesickness, but doesn’t do much for the home-buying fund (HAHAHAHHA I do not have one of those funds).

The last few photos are of me trying to get a good look at my pus-riddled throat and inflamed tonsils using a spoon as a tongue depressor. Apparently I’m an infected one ATM and I wanted to see just how gross my throat looked. I don’t really know what this indicates in a fiscal sense, but I doubt this is what the marketing team expected audiences to have on their phone.

* Don’t worry, I just looked it up and Dick Van Dyke is still alive. The delightful man is 92 and, I sincerely hope, is going strong.

I almost posted a photo of my lunch on social media today.

This isn’t something I do often, but I have been known to do it. Usually, my photos aren’t those heavily-filtered food porn snaps I sometimes find myself scrolling through.

No, mine are nitty gritty no frills food photos. They’re mugs of gravy. They’re hot chip sandwiches. They’re fried kangaroo fillets posted on the same day a viral story went around about a sad kangaroo. So no, they aren’t pretty. They’re like the food equivalent to paparazzi photos of 2007 celebrities leaving the gym.

Rather than applying filters, I usually take great care in making them look as naturally shit as possible. I don’t want anyone to think I’m trying too hard with my Instagram posts, despite how much overthinking goes into each angle and the several drafts I do of captions before hitting “share”. But because I’m not posting a selfie, I’m like, totes morally superior.

I mean, even though I’m trying to win everybody’s affection and validate my existence through painstakingly constructed Insty posts that’s so different from posting a booty shot, aye.

But all jokes aside, I’m really trying to work on toning down my self-righteous dial on the Insty front, and I think I’ve come a long way. I posted a selfie from when I was in Darwin. I cropped my back end out of another photo from the same trip so my croc schnitty belly seemed less pronounced. Heck, I’ve even posted a photo alluding to the fact that I exercise.

So when I had a cracker of a lunch, I’m surprised I didn’t share it with the rest of the digital world. The problem was, that it would have been too long of a caption. Because I’m bloody terrible at cutting a long story short and also don’t want to leave out a single detail. So instead of simply posting a quick photo of my lunch with a snappy caption, I decided to write an in-depth account of what I ingested today on my blog. Yep, I’m too sanctimonious to post glamour shots on my Instagram, but I’m self-obsessed enough to think that people will actually care about and read my blog. Go figure.

So here it is, my lunch story that I just HAD to share with someone:

I had a double banger of a lunch today.

After making a stir-fry for two for one (meaning a stir-fry that that would be enough to feed two people in a normal household, but is served in a giant bowl in front of a singular greedy guts in a household with no judgmental, prying eyes), I ended up eating about three quarters of it.

What I had leftover was sustainable enough to be put in a container, but not enough to make up for an actual lunch – particularly for someone who eats family-sized portions out of large mixing bowls like a barnyard animal at a feeding trough.

So I sat it in the fridge, thinking it would make for a decent snack through the week.

But then yesterday I luxed out and bought myself a healthy wank fest of a lunch – grilled salmon, brown rice and a shitload of tabouleh. It’s the kind of lunch I wake up excited about. I bloody LOVE this fishy box of parsley and fibre and dreams.

But dreams don’t come cheap. Apparently, they cost $18. Now, $18 might not sound all that expensive a dream for someone who dreams of flying to Concord USA to have an emotional breakdown in front of the Little Women house (one day…), but if your dream is promoting regular bowel movements, that’s pricey.

So as I sat there, tucking into my smug lunch, I began adding up how many meals I could get out of $18 had I spent that money at a grocery store. And when you take into account the fact that I sometimes consider sweated onions with chopped up bacon a meal, I figured I could make that money go much further. So I stopped myself halfway through and put the now soggy box, sodden with salad dressing and false hope, in the fridge for another lunch.

Then today something magical happened.

The stars aligned, and I essentially had two lunches. I packed my gingery, garlic mess of a stir-fry and turned up to work remembering that a wanker salad was waiting for me in the staff fridge.

And let me tell you, that puts a certain spring in your step.

***

Yep. That’s my awesome lunch story I just couldn’t not share with you people. I opted to tell the internet about my lunch rather than watch another episode of The Handmaid’s Tale. I spent at least 30 minutes writing that. Seriously. This is my life.

UPDATE ON HEALTH WEEK 
YEAH NAH: Felt a sharp pain in my stomach last night, and actually caught myself hoping that it was the early onset of a violent bout of food poisoning. Maybe this was becasue I didn’t want to be active today, maybe it was becasue I wanted an excuse to stay home and watch the first episode Game of Thrones or maybe it was because the evacuation of my bowels and stomach would give me the validation I needed to eat hot chip sandwiches “to regain my strength”.
NAH YEAH: Despite this mildly concerning desire for diarrhea, I managed to wake up five minutes earlier, stretched before breakfast and packed myself a fucking backpack so I can jog/powerwalk/dawdle home. There’s even a curry veggie patty dream sandwich in there. Maybe I can be a health goddess! Maybe I’ll do it! Maybe I’ll even eat my lunch outside while repeating positive affirmations to myself or some bullshit. 

6.58am UPDATE:

YEAH NAH: My curry veggie patty sandwich of dreams got smooshed in my backpack. 

Alright everyone, I’m going to try to start a new health regime.

I have the apartment to myself for the next two weeks and I feel I either have to turn it into a sex cave or a wellness retreat to fully make use of this golden solitude.

Considering I currently have no prospects in the romantic, or even not-at-all-romantic, department, I’m going to have to go with wellness retreat by default. And hey, perhaps this may contribute to my romantic prospects. Because nothing attracts lover quite like talking about how many squats you did in a cloud of Brussels sprouts fart, right?

It’s Sunday, so I’m feeling both guilty and optimistic.

Guilty because all I did today was visit a filming location for Looking for Alibrandi (University of Sydney, to be exact. Of course it was beautiful but I forced myself to be underwhelmed at the size of the main quadrangle, which I snapped to my interstate mates informing them that UQ’s Great Court is bigger – because apparently I am a walking Euphoric Queensland Meme) and eat a doughnut at the new coffee place that just opened around the corner. It was almond meal, so I feel good about that. And I had been wanting to suss the place out for a while, so it’s somewhat of an item checked off my to do list. I also washed my sheets, but that’s starting to feel like less of an achievement and more of something I just need to do (like brushing my teeth) as I cement myself as a grown up.

But I still feel like I wasted my day.

So I’ve got the guilt going, but I like to turn my guilt into something useful. I’ll try to turn it into optimism, because heavens knows I’m unable to conjure positivity out of nothing but good feelings. Even my positivity has to be rooted in negativity.

In order to turn things around, I’ve bought myself some lilies, which are now sitting in a vase on the dining room table. I told myself that I deserve them, but I’m hoping this will have an ongoing effect of making me work hard to continue feeling like I deserve them – look, just because it’s illogical doesn’t mean it won’t work.

With just a few hours left until a new week begins, I’ve got together a list of ideas that I’m hoping I stick to instead of simply running off the high that comes from having written a to do list and abandoning said tasks because I’ve already got the hit I needed.

And it’s not just bodily health. I’m going to focus on my mind too, because it’s currently in a state of mush. I can’t spell. I can’t remember people’s names. I generally feel dumb. Something must be done, but in a minimally exerting manner.

Overall, the idea is to be kind to myself, but in a way that gives me a tight rig.

So far I don’t have much, but the idea is to do things that I couldn’t otherwise do with my housemate here because I don’t want to wake her up/get in her way/take up too much space/be embarrassed about my lack of fitness/create unpleasant smells I wouldn’t put up with if I hadn’t made them.

This includes:

• cooking fish-based dishes
• doing stretches before breakfast
• squatting in front of the TV
• making sweet potato brownies
• painting my feelings
• listening to meditative music an hour before bedtime
• having spontaneous two-minute dance parties for one
• cooking and eating an unprecedented amount of Brussels sprouts
• doing crossword puzzles
• doing an actual puzzle, taking up the other half of the dining room table that isn’t taken up with paintings of my feelings

That was a very quick list, there’s bound to be more as the week goes on.

I’m not sure how this week will go but I hope I can at least make it to Friday before I consume an entire family-sized pie and watch Bridget Jones’ anything.

Stay tuned.

This serves as both my Wednesday update, and my sick note for Sunday. However, I’d be lying if I said my neglect was down to purely illness. While I consider an addiction to Pretty Little Lairs an unhealthy affliction, I think it would be stretching it to call my current state an “illness”.

I make my apology with no pledge to amend my behaviour – at least not until I find out who this drongo A is.

I don’t care how much critics may slam this show, I need to know and I refuse to resort to spoilers.

Originally published in The Clifton Courier, July 6, 2107

I really wish I had an exciting story for you this week.

I’d like to tell you about how I ate a burrito the size of a newborn baby and got my photo plastered on a restaurant’s wall of fame in the process. I’d like to regale you all with the glorious moments that led up to the time I did a shooey with a former member of One Direction. Heck, I’d even be happy giving you a detailed account about how an ibis touched my face and the sheer filth of the situation prompted me to projectile vomit right into the path of businessmen wearing loafers that cost more than my car (given the fact my dear old Camry was eventually sold off for a hundred bucks, that wouldn’t be hard).

But I have none of those tales for you. Because none of that happened.

I didn’t get to tick off any of those life goals – well, the first two would be considered life goals. If I go through life having not experienced the ibis run-in, I’ll consider that a life goal achieved.

Nope, no interesting yarns for you.

Because I spent the whole week feeling under the weather.

And not “under the weather” in the standard “someone needs to stop taking just a novelty-length straw and two bottles of Passion Pop to parties”* sense of the phrase.

* Never stop. Don’t listen to them! They don’t get you and they’ll never be your true friends! 

I’m talking “under the weather” as in actually legitimately sick. My throat felt like I’d swallowed one of those green scouring sponges without water. My nose was involuntarily expelling liquid without warning. And, weirdly, one of my nostrils constantly had that piercing cold feeling you get when you breathe in while standing outside in the frost – even when I was in a heated room.

Intelligently, I declined the on-the-house flu vaccination my workplace offered, despite living in one of the most populated cities in the Southern Hemisphere. My train line is the one that goes to and from the airport, meaning I’m exposed to all kinds of international travellers and their potential exotic diseases. And still I didn’t sign up for the free flu shot. Not because I’m an anti-vaxer, but because I’m a damned fool (which, not trying to get political or anything, overwhelming evidence would suggest is kind of the same thing).

I simply forgot to sign up for it.

And now I’m on to Day Seven of feeling fluey and I’ve had enough, thank you very much.

I’m writing this now on the couch, where I ended up spending much of my weekend. I’m not kidding; there’s a telling indentation in the cushion, which I’m really hoping will spring back to normal overnight while I’m in bed.

This really stinks, because my housemate went off on holidays this weekend. I had the place to myself and I could have had a wild time.

I don’t have that many friends here in Sydney, but I have enough that I could have had an interpretive dance party. I could have filled the place with metallic balloons, replaced all the light bulbs with blue globes and filled the place with people in unitards. I’m not sure where I would have sourced several skintight one pieces on such short notice, but I could have tried.

What I’m saying is, I could have done something cool with the sound knowledge my housemate wasn’t going to come home and judge me.

Instead, I “celebrated” having the place to myself by watching a two-hour Jane Austen adaptation on Netflix and used the dining table chairs to air-dry my sheets.

And yes, that doesn’t actually sound like a horrible time because I love Alan Rickman and having clean sheets, but that’s not the point.

The point is that I had the opportunity to have a fully sick time and I spent it being actually, not figuratively, sick.

And that sickens me.

I realise this is a late and I’m well aware of my repeated promises to be more reliable with my posting, but I have no exciting yarn/example of destructive overthinking for you these evening.

I’ve been sick all week and haven’t done something even remotely cool enough to spin into juicy tale for you – for heaven’s sake, I just wrote a 600 word column about how uneventful my week has been on account of the phlegm factory I’ve been operating as this week.

So I don’t even have a yarn for you about not having a yarn – that’s one you’re going to have to wait to read after publication, if you can hold on that long.

All I have for you is a cautionary tale about actually staying home sick if you’re sick so you’re recovered in time to actually do fun stuff over your weekend instead of stagging from bed to couch for two days.

Instead of staying home in bed, I decided to be a fucking hero and continue showing up for work even though I spent the whole week with a facial expression like I was just about to sneeze. It would have looked as if I was giving the world the stink-eye while trying to stay awake after taking heavy sleeping pills.

On Thursday night I couldn’t even bring myself to pack a simple lunch for the following day. And I was so lethargic on Friday that I ended up buying a smoothie for lunch, sucking mushy sustenance out of a straw instead of going through all the extra effort of using cutlery to bring food to my face and chewing it for myself.

It wasn’t until I caught myself stuffing my snotty tissues in the empty cardboard cup that I realised I was waaaaay worse shape than I allowed myself to think I was.

I never pretend to be the most professional of professionals, but using a dirty old smoothie cup filled with snotty tissues to support my head crossed a line I didn’t even know I had.

Despite all my better judgment, a combination guilt, fear of being viewed as lazy, not wanting to veer from routine makes me try to stick it out through a flu when I need to acknowledge that this isn’t wise. Healthy Dannielle scoffs at this, knowing that trying to be a martyr is just annoying and puts everyone else at risk of catching whatever the big hero has. But Sick Dannielle is vulnerable to those guilty notions and too sickly to think straight.

So she tries to carry on. But it never ends well, and always makes her sicker longer than she needs to be.

Don’t do what I did, kids.

You probably don’t need to be explicitly told “don’t have a cardboard snot cylinder at your desk at 25 years old”, but it seems I do.

Heed my warning, and for heaven’s sake keep your feet covered.