Originally published in The Clifton Courier, August 16, 2017

The other night I shamed myself.

Now, before you get carried away, I didn’t vomit into a sink, swear obnoxiously into a microphone of a bowls club karaoke night or beg for someone’s socks to cushion my aching feet (all other stories for other times).

In fact, for most of the night I was a model citizen.

But as I was walking home, I did a dishonourable thing. I used a pub purely for its restroom facilities and didn’t spend a cent.

You see, I had consumed a fair amount of liquid that evening and needed to use a ladies room. I was travelling solo, I wasn’t about to order a plate of ribs and tuck in alone.

So I walked into the establishment with a plan. My gaze was alternating between scanning the room and frowning at my phone as I mustered up all the acting skills I obtained from Year 10 drama to pretend I was in there to meet a friend.

Having put on the best performance my limited abilities would allow, I waltzed into the ladies room.

On my way out, I did an encore. I did my best to look extremely cross, phone in hand, as if I’d just been ditched.

Look, we’ve all done it from time to time.

We’ve all been en route from one pub to the other and heard the call of nature.

There’s a sense of urgency when you receive that call. You can’t screen it for too long without dire consequences.

Depending on your gender, you may or may not be have done so in shoes of a ludicrously impractical height and a quality so low, you couldn’t guarantee they’d hold together all night. This shortens your strides and makes walking decidedly more jerky, which isn’t good for an impatient bladder. You knew that waiting to your preferred pub wasn’t an option because it would take you that much longer to walk there.

Compound this with the bone-chillingly cruel winds and that unnecessarily slippery fog-meets-drizzle Toowoomba is famous for, and holding on until you reach your desired destination seems impossible.

So maybe you’ve stopped at some old pub half way through your journey to answer that call. You might have stayed for an obligatory beer, but if there were more than three people at the bar to distract the staff and you crept through a side door, you didn’t even bother.

And, depending on how… hydrated you were, you usually felt a pang of guilt as you left. But you still left.

You might have reasoned that it was better than the alternative. You didn’t want to have an accident and then call it a night – that would have meant spending less money in other pubs and bypassing the obligatory hot chips and gravy sesh afterwards. That would have had a negative economic effect on the entire precinct. And even though you never intended to spend your dosh at your toilet pit stop, you told yourself that the flow on effect of you partying on would have benefited the establishment in some way. That’s one way I’ve reasoned it.

But looking back, I should have felt guilty. I didn’t deem the place good enough for me to spend some time and my money, but I was fine with dumping my bodily excrement there. What a jerk.

And I was probably missing out on a good time. The gum-chewing, bleached-rats-tail-footy-haircut-toting gronks I avoided wouldn’t have been there. The dance floor, while non-existent at the time, could have been started easily and had ample room for moving interpretive dance performances. And, let’s be honest, pubs like that always have cheaper drinks. I was the fool.

So next time, I vow to buy a beer at the next pub I empty my bladder in. And if it’s the end of the night and I’m riding solo, I’ll get ribs.

Because having a whole plate of ribs you don’t have to share sounds like a pretty good way to end the night anyhow.

On Monday, I had a bit of a meltdown.

I was home sick and was weary enough not to change out of my pyjamas, but just functional enough to use the internet (which, essentially, sounds like my constant state of being). I decided to use my time off to get a few things organised for my visit to a tax agent in a few weeks’ time and do a cheeky pre-emptive tax return estimation to get a rough idea of what I could expect to receive.

This, especially given my current state, was a baaaaaaaad choice.

I discovered that my silly notion of not taking holidays in my previous job, which I had left in the first half of last July, meant the lump sum payout when I finally quit was included in my total earnings for the financial year just gone. And this meant I was bumped up over the threshold for repaying my HELP debt for that financial year. The consequence of this was that the decent chunk of change I’d originally thought I was entitled to upon a previous estimate had diminished by an obscene amount.

The money I’d already spent in my imagination disappeared from my grasp, and I didn’t even get to enjoy the thrill of gambling it away or dramatically setting it able to make a point about capitalism.

Needless to say, I wasn’t in a great state after this discovery. I was snotty, I was tired and I was soberly aware of how poor my financial decision-making skills were. I was in a rut, and it was all my own doing.

Compound this with the episode of Insight I happened to catch a short while after this nasty surprise. I usually love Insight. It’s one of the best programs on television. Jen Brockie is fabulous – she’s compassionate in a non-condescending way and is non-judgemental and removed without being cold – and each episode is real food for thought. But this week’s episode was hard to swallow.

I’d caught an afternoon rerun of the program, which focused on older women living in difficult conditions as a result of the financial state they found themselves in. Some of them were divorcees, some of them had businesses go bust and some of them were just never in a position to get themselves ahead financially. One woman lived in a campervan. Another lived in her car. These brave women shared their stories and some of them didn’t appear as if they’d have happy endings.

It was devastatingly sad and kicked me right in the guts. It didn’t just make me think about my own lack of a financial planning and insight, but made me aware that even if I did make all the right choices, I may one way be in a similar position.

I spoke on the phone to Mum about it, asking her if she’d had a financial plan as a woman my age. She hadn’t really, nothing overly concrete.

It’s easy to hear these stories and, being removed from the individual situations, label the women as foolish or complacent. It’s easy to say “you should have bought a house” or “you should have thought ahead”.

But what does that actually mean? What could they have actually even done? And how do I apply this to my life, being at the pivotal age and position I am to influence the course of my life for better or worse? It got me thinking about my own plans, and where I expected to end up at my mother’s age.

I do have a plan for my retirement. When both our husbands are dead, my childhood best friend and I plan on buying a beautiful old house just a few kilometres outside the town we grew up in. It’s a pretty ideal way to live out your days – among the olive trees with a lifelong friend, with plenty of wine and fresh, country air. But it hinges on a lot of assumptions and a lot of unknowns. We assume that we’ll both marry. We assume our dearly beloveds will cark it around the same time. We assume we’ll out live them. And we assume we’ll have enough dollars to not only buy the house, but to live comfortably in it.

There are so many logistical details to this plan that we simply haven’t thought out – how we’ll con some poor schmuck into marrying us, how we’ll ensure they die before we do and where we’ll find this money.

We have an end destination, but have in no way mapped out how we’ll reach this end point. My steps to get there are simply “be wealthy” and “don’t die”. The nitty gritty deets that will ensure this plan goes ahead just aren’t in place. Practical steps to this broad plan are missing.

The last practical plan I came up with was deciding to have a small dinner at 5.30pm so I could have toast and vegemite, my third breakfast of the day (I had cereal for actual breakfast and an acai bowl for lunch at like 4pm) for dessert. And hey, I’m not knocking this plan. It’s a great plan. And at just after 7.30pm, I am reaping its benefits. There’s truly nothing like enjoying a cup of tea and some buttery, salty toast on a cold, stormy night.

But unfortunately I don’t apply the same meticulous planning to the big picture aspects of my life as I do to triple breakfasts.

So what do I do now? What’s the plan? What’s my future?

Well, considering my livelihood is based on my humour writing and I’ve just written a deeply depressing post, I may have to fall back on some of my other “plans”.

Unfortunately, Plan B for when everything goes completely to shit isn’t really a plan, but more of a gimmick. It’s based on my big idea of a burger joint where the buns are exclusively garlic bread. That’s it. That’s my backup. Garlic bread burgers.

Beyond that, Plan C is being hit by a fancy, fancy car and living off the compo.

Suddenly that rule about multiple-choice exams and always going with C when you don’t know an answer seems so incredibly poignant.

Yesterday, I found myself needing to take cough mixture*.

I poured myself a little dose in a medicinal shot glass and stared it down.

There was a thick, pink challenge in front of me and I found myself yearning for a line of salt and a congratulatory lemon wedge to help me knock it back.

The thought struck me that I was needing to psych myself up more for a shot of strawberry-flavoured cough suppressant that was going to improve my health than I ever needed to psych myself up for a shot of tequila that tasted like methylated sin and would probably/definitely make me clog a sink with my vomit.

Which is weird.

Because every damn morning I eat three cubes of diced, frozen kale that I’ve heated up in the microwave. I can’t say I enjoy it, but I do it to get dat veggie count up. I start my mornings off with a mouthful of sloppy gunk that could very well have been scraped from the bottom of a lawn mower after particularly damp day because I’ve been told it’s good for my body. And what’s good for my body is good for my rig.

And this demonstrates that I am capable of enduring discomfort for a perceived positive outcome.

For example, I am happy to endure the brief discomfort of having straight tequila in my mouth for the positive outcome of being a sloshy mess. Sure, I may put my hair up in a precautionary bun in case of a cheeky vom, but this move is less about stalling than it is for ensuring I don’t get carrot chunks in my ponytail. If I were sporting a pixie cut or wearing a swimming cap to da club (something to think about, actually, when you consider how knotted my hair gets on the d-floor) I wouldn’t hesitate. And if said shot was free, the decision to down it is practically immediate.

The idea of getting smashed was the proverbial spoonful of sugar to help the tequila go down.

But it seems “not coughing up globs of phlegm in the middle of the night” wasn’t an outcome I felt was worth enduring a quick taste of cough mixture.

If it’s not going to get me sloshy or skinny, it’s hard for me to swallow, apparently.

I don’t know what this says about my level of maturity and my apparent enthusiasm for self-destruction, but I hardly think it could be considered a positive sign.

* The other morning I was coughing so hard in my sleep that I woke myself up and vomited. But unfortunately I didn’t hurl up enough to warrant a super luxe double banger breakfast – it was just enough to require a teeth cleaning. I wouldn’t have called it a high point of my week.

** Since writing this, I’m wondering if the answer to my problem isn’t simply creating a tequila shot equivalent for cough mixture. 

Considering the medicine is strawberry-flavoured, I could rack up a line of desiccated coconut and have a wedge from a scone waiting for me. Because if being healthy isn’t reward enough to tempt me into taking my medicine, baked goods might just do the trick.

There’s a plastic bag hanging off the draw of my desk near my bed, hung there for the sole purpose of containing the tissues I coughed my will-never-be-a-trendy-feature-wall-coloured sputum into so I didn’t have to keep getting up, thus preventing a heap of filthy tissues piling up on my floor. It’s pretty full right now.

This morning I thought of posting a photo of it on Instagram saying “a tissue for everyone of my issues”.

Then I thought that there was probably a cracking metaphor in there somewhere, but I was too lousy to draw parallels between my current situation in life and a plastic bag full of snotty, phlegm-socked tissues.

I know that a healthier, yet equally as cynical, Dannielle could have done it with relative ease. But today I just couldn’t make the connection. Instead, I just went and lay down.

In fact, just writing the above 100-or-so words was tiring enough, let alone having to succinctly sum up your current situation, apply it to the context of the dank rubbish bag and think up yet another term for “yucky coloured gunk you splutter up when you’re sick” so you don’t overuse the word “phlegm”. I did, however, learn once and for all how to correctly spell phlegm today, so it’s not a total waste.

So, in the attempt to both satisfy my anxious need to post regular content on my self-important blog and be sympathetic to my limp-minded state, I give you another bloody Sunday of self-indulgently answering questions about myself in a bid to win your admiration.

Some of these questions I found form looking at job interview questions on the internet, some I just made up. Try to guess which is which!

What’s the last thing you watched and why did you watch it? I watched that episode of Sex and the City from season one where Carrie goes out on a date with a French architect and wakes up with $1000. It has to be one of my favourite episodes.

Firstly, there’s the scene where Carrie, Miranda and Samantha are in a fancy hotel room eating a luxe room service breakfast and decide to order a second, for-the-table salmon eggs benedict. That’s livin’ Barry.

Secondly, Carrie gets free shoes. Sure, they look like they came in a plastic bag with a four-year-old’s fairy princess costume set, but they were spency and totes free.

Lastly, Carrie gets paid for something she was going to do anyway. That’s like someone paying me to make complain about Daylight Savings or make a cup of tea. I don’t want to be one of those people who classify all women together in a neat little box for comedic purposes (we just love chocolate, am I right sistas, LOOOOOL) so I’ll just say this: it would be my dream to wake up after a fabulous day and evening of excellent sex to an empty bed, $1000 in cash and the opportunity to luxe out on room service. I’m sure there would be many people who would agree with me.

So, yeah long story short, I spent my Saturday night watching Sex and the City, hoping my financial woes would magically be solved by French architect with no follow ups.

What’s you favourite colour? Blue. But it depends on the context. I like a strong, dark blue in some instances, but would probs opt for a more duck egg blue if we were talking interiors. I’d opt for a black car over a blue one, however.

What’s your favourite vegetable? As a staunch carrot lover, it’s hard for me to nominate any others to sit above this crunchy orange conical stick of fibre. I mean, I had three extremely large carrot drawings on my walls for a large hunk of my young adult life.

However, I’m definitely into sweet potato and am right into my Brussles sprouts at the moment. For some reason we were never a sprouts household, so my opinion of the mini cabbages was based purely on the strongly negative reaction of kids in American television shows.

Now, as a seasoned adult, I like to fry the little bastards in olive oil, season with salt and pepper and sometimes chuck in a few bits of bacon.

You’ve been given an elephant. You can’t give it away or sell it. What would you do with the elephant? I’d try to sneak it into various meetings so I could interrupt with a dramatic, “I think we need to address the elephant in the room”.

Do you ever feel like a plastic bag? Apparently, yes. Sometimes I feel empty. Sometimes I feel like I’m full of rubbish. Other times I feel like I’ve been shoved under the kitchen sink.

What do you do for yourself? Sometimes I post carefully constructed photos on Instagram to enjoy the steady stream of likes I get in a bid to feel as if I did something of substance that day. On Friday I took 24 photos of a hot chook from various angles, but I cracked the 50 likes mark, so it was worth it.

What do you do to keep yourself centred? Boil the kettle.

What is your spiritual practice? Watching Practical Magic.

Tell me something that’s true, that almost nobody agrees with you on? Dachshunds are not cute. They are aggressive little jerks who can barely walk. They probs have the right to be cranky considering the entire purpose of the agony of their existence is to be a novelty canine cylinder.

What would someone who doesn’t like you say about you? “Bitch needs to stop shedding her hair everywhere like a border collie.”

It’s true, I leave hair EVERYWHERE. This is helpful in two ways. Firstly, it keeps me from doing illegal things because I know my traitorous strands will lead the CSI guys to me like a trail of breadcrumbs. I don’t know exactly what kind of criminal life I’d be leading if my hair didn’t shed so much, but considering my appalling lying abilities it’s probably best I lead the life of a law abiding citizen.

Secondly, I like to think that if I ever get kidnapped, my hair will led the CSI guys to me like a trail of breadcrumbs. Hopefully I’ll be the person in the episode they manage to find just before any lasting physical or mental damage is inflicted on me and I manage to get a book deal out of it. I really want to meet Oprah.

What have you invented? Most of my problems.

I’ve gone full on grown up.

This afternoon I got home from Brisbane and had the self-restraint to book a flight back to Sydney so I would arrive in daylight so I’d have time to gear up for the week ahead. Usually I’m so desperate for warm weather, attention and slightly-too-long hugs that I fly home as late as possible. But it seems I’ve turned a corner.

I arrived home with enough time to do some washing and prep lunch for tomorrow. At one point I was ironing dress shirts to wear to work while some Brussels sprouts were cooking away on the stove. I was so damn mature.

And I was thinking I’d have to do a half-arsed ramble/apology or a blog post this evening because I had nothing in the bank and no energy to come up with something.

But as it turns out, I was grown up enough to prepare something earlier. And sure, it’s by no means my best work (it makes no vomit mentions, soz) but it’s something. And just when you thought I couldn’t be any more of an adult (please imagine that being said by Chandler Bing), here’s the kicker: my responsibly pre-emptive blog post was about lattes.

I don’t even know who I am anymore.

Anyway, here’s what Dannielle The Grown Up has to say about hot takeaway beverages:

As a big smoke dwelling city gal who works in the media, I’ve started drinking coffees. (Translation: I’ve turned to drinking sugary, cinnamon chai lattes to make living in in this overpriced hovel more palatable).

And I’ve found a new hack to ensure my drinks are always hot.

You see, I like my hot drinks to be actually hot. I prefer to run the risk of scalding my throat than having to swallow the milky disappointment of room temperature beverages. And I want every hot drink I drink to meet the same heat standard. Because life’s too damn short to suckle from the teat of lukewarm meritocracy. You’re better than that. I’m better than that.

But often, drinks made on hot milk don’t make the grade because the milk is often heated in batches.

But there’s a secret.

And that secret is skim milk. It probably makes very little difference to the waistline, so it’s not about being health conscious. It’s about consumer trends, and knowing how to exploit them for personal gain.

Here’s the thing – no one drinks skim milk anymore. The purists are still demanding their full cream dreams, having written skim off as “watery shit” and taking a weirdly strong stance against a type milk since the dawn of the low fat movement. And the former skim crowd have moved on to fancier, generally-perceived-to-be-healthier, milks. I’m talking soy. Almond. Cashew. Anything that can be activated and pulsed in a food processor.

Skim milk used to be al the rage, but it just isn’t on-trend liquid anymore. Even all those women who used to order “skinny chinos” are nowhere to be seen. And they used to LOVE their skinny chinos. They’d walk in with their capris and asymmetrical bobs and those phone cases that doubled as wallets and sip skinny chinos until the cows came home. But now, the skinny chino crowd is no more. Those women are either going to cafes in their exclusive suburbs or have jumped on the nut juice wagon.

As a result of this enormous societal change I’ve found that, often, the skim milk has to be frothed up fresh, just for me. And because I can’t really taste the difference between skim and full cream, it’s not even a compromise.

This makes me feel pretty cluey. It’s like insisting on having fresh chips without looking like a total arsehole who thinks it’s ok to treat teenage fastfood workers like human scum (clearly, I have some unaddressed issues in this area). Because if there’s one thing I hate as much as a disappointing tea, it’s being a bad customer. Some people get their kicks by flexing in front of weaklings at the gym. Others enjoy the looks they get while wearing tight pants. I get high off being an exceptionally kind customer in a sea full of rude bastards. I live for that shit. And I’m in the right city for it.

I may not have insight into the stock market and I’m generally clueless about which suburbs are best to buy in, but that’s my grown up tip for you. Use this information however you chose.

(I mean, you could always just ask for your milk to be extra hot, but who wants to deal with the anxiety of making a special request?!)

It’s Sunday and you’re getting served up another round of “Dannielle interviews herself because she has no good ideas and narcissistic tendencies”.

The problem is that Dannielle decided that a sunny winter’s day in Sydney was a good day to go for a swim in the ocean. Now her brain is broken and she’s referring to herself in third person. Like Elmo.

So she’s kind of unable to come up with a decent idea for a blog post and resorted to ripping questions from various quizzes off the Internet, slotting in a quote from Mean Girls to beef out the post and packaging it as original content.

She says she’s sorry, but she doesn’t mean it.

When was the last time you cried?

I was watching The Intern, and Anne Hathaway told Robert Di Niro he was her best friend.

I’ve started owning my tears, guys, and I urge you too. It’s so freeing.

Cry in The Goofy Movie if you want to. Well up over the assisted homecare living ads. Shit, let that tear fall to your keyboard when you’re listening to the Little Women soundtrack at work and the song Beth dies to (soz for the spoiler, but that movie is about to get it’s second remake so you had more than enough time to watch it. And don’t even get me stated about the book) comes on.

Emotions are powerful. So are you. Don’t hide your tears, embrace them!

If you were another person, would you be a friend of yourself?

Obviously. I give the best birthday presents, I called people “nugget” as a term of endearment and I like to make scones. That’s someone another person would love to be friends with. Plus, I put a lot of effort into my Instagram account so it makes it worth being digital friends with me even for distant acquaintance.

Do you use sarcasm a lot? Never.

Scary movie or happy endings? Happy endings. Every time. Back in the day I used to praise movies like Bring It On for not having a corny, predictable ending where our favourite team has a win. Now I yearn for the days of Sister Act II when St. Francis Academy won the choir competition because they were the best, the freshest act and I had emotional ties to them.

I don’t give a shit about realism. That’s why I’m watching a movie in the first place – to escape the suffocating realities of human life. I want to see my heroes get what they deserve so I can pretend that good things to happen to good (or in my case, not totally horrible) people.

Favourite smells? Anything gravy-related. Unfortunately there’s not a scented candle for that… yet.

Do you have any special talents? I can make any situation about me. It’s almost magic. My mum being sick and nearly dying? That gave me a lot of extra work to do around the house. My sister getting married? The zipper of my bridesmaid dress breaks and I have to be sewn in. Mothers’ Day Weekend? I made my parents drive three hours for brunch.

See? It’s not just a talent, it’s a gift.

Do you have any pets? An emotionally distant blue heeler named Lady, because she’s a diva. She’s perfection.

What do you want to be when you grow up? I told my biology teacher my goal was to be a “cynical blogger” when she asked us our career goals in Year 11. Well Carol, I fucking did it.

What would you (or have you) name your children? At this point, I want to have a Dannielle, a Daniel Patrick and a Bruce. This is problematic, however, because I want to have four girls and no boys.

What was your first stuffed animal what was its name? I was given a teddy bear from my grandmother when I was born that is wearing a Santa hat. I was born in early January. It took me years to realise that the hat was actually a Santa hat and not a quaint cap that just happened to be red and that my grandmother had given me a teddy that was clearly discounted clearance Christmas stock. Perhaps I knew all along, considering I never gave the thing a name.

What’s the cool jams? Right now I’m right into Every Time You Cry by Johnny Farnham and the boys from Human Nature. I’ve also been giving Stand By Me and Sunday Morning a few spins lately. That might be because I was quite hungover yesterday and needed some “easy listening” music. It was a big Friday night for me. Someone kept buying tequila shots, and essentially all I ate for dinner was roughly half a lemon (in wedge-from) and three chicken-flavoured chips.