Monthly Archives: December 2017

This one made it to print

Colourless conversation

Originally published in The Clifton Courier, December 13, 2017 
Sometimes I worry that I’m going to run out of stories.
I was at a Christmas party the other night when it occurred to me that maybe I’m not the best conversationalist.
We were less than half an hour in when I was told that I’d already burned through my standard chatting-with-acquaintances-I-know-little-about-and-would-like-to-avoid-offending topics. I’d already asked people in the circle what their favourite colour was and I’d already told the story about the fellow I used to know who lost a tooth at Stereosonic (a festival that featured techno music and attracted a particular demographic of men in singlets who spent a lot of time at the gym). Apparently I’d pulled out those old chestnuts at the pub the weekend before. My bored audience were wary of my tired conversational moves. And they weren’t even showstoppers. I mean, I’d even whipped out the classic “so how about that local sporting team…” line.*
* I did, however, find myself talking about the experience of having head lice as an adult. This isn’t a consolation and, in fact, enforces my hypothesis about my bad conversational skills. 
I’m not sure how it happened, but at 25-years-old I have become someone who recycles their stories at social occasions.
And now that I think about it, that’s a bit of a worry. Because my livelihood kind of relies on my ability to tell fresh stories and have new ideas.
Each week I try to think of something interesting to write up in this hallowed rectangular section of paper and I worry about being repetitive. I mean, there’s only so many different ways you can weave in your conflicting beliefs combining existential nihilism and the overwhelming feeling that you can find meaning in everything. There are only so many vomit stories I can tell. And the “I’m a relatable hot mess of a twenty-something who is completely different to any girl you’ve ever met before and still doesn’t get this whole adult thing” narrative gets stale faster than an uncovered sponge cake. So coming up with something fresh each week can be difficult.
I worry that, eventually, I’ll run out of stories.
And you might say that I already have. I mean, I did a story about vacuuming a few weeks ago. It doesn’t really compare to having gastro at Splendour in the Grass or breaking my wrist after being thrown off a horse. I worry that all my golden material has already been packaged up and milked dry, and all I have left are jokes about my penchant for red wine and lemonade*.
* Which, I’ll remind you, is a legit recipe in a Nigella Lawson cookbook, so save me your judgement. It’s a festive Christmassy drink or, as I like to think of it, sangria without the fruit. 
I suppose this is what compels me to do the stupid things I tend to do, such as dressing up as a block of chocolate for a Christmas party. It seems that as a result of my yearning for good yarns, I’m intrinsically driven to humiliate myself. I’m not sure if my subconscious desire to create humorous anecdotes is the path to a happy, fulfilling life but I certainly hope it results in a few interesting tales.
I have to be hopeful that my particular combination of personality traits and love of day drinking will continue to produce experiences I can exploit for literary (I use that word loosely) purposes.
Why, tomorrow I am heading to an event where hundreds of people dress up as Santa and converge on the pubs of Manly. My friend and I plan on going as presents, wearing cumbersome cardboard boxes covered in Christmas wrapping paper. Surely something has to come out of that*.
* As it turns out, it was a marvellous day. I had to come home early because I had to work the next day. I’d learned from last year, when I sneaked away early and took a dip in the ocean in a bid to sober myself up for the ferry home. Unfortunately I went into the water wearing my shoes and clothes and probably got a rash from the sand caught in my damp, cheap Santa pants. 
If so, you may just read about it next week. And if there’s no column in next week’s paper, you can assume that I went a little too far and landed myself in jail. And not that I’m angling to be locked up or anything, but being shoved into the back of a paddy wagon dressed as a Christmas present sure would make for one heck of a story to tell over a few beers.
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This one did not

A Christmas listicle

The other day I finally sent my sisters a list of gift ideas for Christmas.

They’d been hounding me for suggestions for a while and, to be honest, I hadn’t even given my Christmas desires much thought. In fact, I’d been in such a funk that thinking up a list of items I would enjoy being given was actually a chore I’d been putting off. Normally this is something I can rattle off without a second thought. But I was just too tired and grumpy. Clearly, I’m in desperate need of a holiday. I mean, right now my favourite Christmas carols are the depressing ones or the slutty ones. That’s probably not a great sign.

But in the end, I was able to string together a list of scented candles and decadent cookbooks (Nigella’s been at it again, and goddamn it do I want her advice and, let’s face it, her life). And I’d be thrilled to receive anything on that list.

But in the shower just now, it occurred to me the kinds of things I should have actually put on that list. Because I realised I have needs more acute than a hardcover confirmation that my life is a steaming pile of shit.

So here’s a more accurate Christmas wish list, featuring my deepest and most realistic desires. It’s like look at the Mirror of Erised, but more depressing and relatable.

Razor blades: on the live-action version of The Grinch, the “gift of a Christmas shave” was an insult cruelly hinting at a deeply traumatic childhood event. In the live-action version of my life, it would be an absolute blessing. Razor blades are crazy expensive. I usually only buy them when there’s a points drive at Coles and I need to bump my weekly shop up to $50 or more. I’d like to say that I only change the razor blades seasonally because I’m stingy, but even four times a year seems too frequent for someone like me. If Santa wanted to give the gift of silk smooth legs and pits for Christmas, I’d be on board.

Somewhere to store my shitty shirts: I stupidly made the decision to move into a room with no built-in wardrobes and because I’m always in a state of suspended stability, I can’t justify spending money on furniture I wouldn’t be able to stuff into my car and speed towards the Queensland border with. But that means that my clothes are currently being stored in washing baskets and suitcases under my bed. And this is super depresso. I mean, it’s handy in a way that, because most of my clothes are lost under my bed, I don’t have to face the full extent of how cheap and shitty my shirt inventory is. But the con of this is that I end up cycling through that same three thinning t-shirts, and they’re getting so worn that I may soon receive an anonymous email indicating how inappropriate they are for public use.

More sports bras: I’ve been wearing them underneath my thinning, crappy t-shirts because their seams are less visible than my normal bras, and so they’re getting pretty worn themselves.

A voucher for someone to give my bathroom a crime-scene-standard clean: it’s the kind of bathroom so old that it didn’t feel clean when I moved in, so I feel like my scum and dead skins cells have layered up over the previous tenants’ personal grime. It would be nice to not accidently get their gunk underneath my fingernails, you know?

Black-out curtains: Because Sydney is ironic in that it leaves you in such a dark place emotionally, but not literally. Even with blinds drawn, you can still see everything with the lights out. I have to sleep with an eye mask and it’s nowhere near as saucy as the movies would have you believe. It just makes you feel like you have a plastic bag around your brain and hate your entire life.

New joggers: I’ve been using jogging as a way of running away from my problems (lately I’ve been listening to Christmas carols as I run – I highly recommend it) but I’ve also been eating my feelings too. This means that my running shoes are getting a lot of wear from overuse but an increasing weight adding extra pressure. They aren’t in good shape, as you can imagine.

A killer deep tissue massage: to work out the kinks of jogging in unsuitable footwear.

A scented candle: I mean, that was on my previous list, but this is also a legitimate emotional need right now so I included it here to emphasise its importance. Scented candles are good for the soul. Also, it would be nice to have something to cover the damp, musty smell of misery that infects my apartment.

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This one made it to print

Time goes by so slowly and time can do so much

Originally published in The Clifton Courier, December 6, 2017

There are some times when a minute seems to span over a different timeframe than 60 seconds.

Sometimes the unit of time that we call one minute can seem like an eternity. Sometimes it can fly by faster than a hummingbird’s heartbeat. Those 60 seconds aren’t standardised; they’re subjective.

Now, I know what you’re thinking, this sounds like the beginning of a really, really dramatic episode of Grey’s Anatomy (and that’s saying something, because that show once had an episode where a guy had an unexploded bazooka in him with Christina bloody Ricci as a guest star and it wasn’t event the season finale). It sounds like something about love or loss or maybe a poetic combination of both.

But I think we both know that’s not what this column is about.

In fact, this column isn’t about anything. It’s true. When I try to tell people what my column is about, I’m often stumped. Usually, it’s about things that cheese me off or something embarrassing I’ve done recently, and often a nice meaty blend of the two. It’s like a placenta smoothie – hard to swallow, flecked with graphic feminism (well, sometimes I do tone down the uterus talk because we are talking about a small town in Maranoa) and probably should never have existed in the first place.

So when there’s a column that is described as “uh…. I don’t really know… it’s not really about anything”, you shouldn’t expect anything too emotional from it. If you want to hear my emotional thoughts, you’re going to need to shout me several rounds and played Bob Seger’s Drift Away on the jukebox on Christmas Eve*.

* I clearly added this in as a ploy to snag a few free schooners at the pub after Christmas Eve Mass. It’s one of the top nights of the year to be out on the town in Clifton – you get pissed with your old schoolmates’ parents and really top up your hug quota. 

So no, this column isn’t going to reach emotional depths – especially considering the most emotional I’ve been lately was when my friend and I re-enacted various scenes from Titanic on a recreation of the ship’s grand staircase.*

* I can’t recommend this enough. If you’re in Sydney before February 4 and have a spare two hours, have a few beers then get down to the Titanic exhibition. They have the actual Heart of the Ocean (yes, that’s a proper noun) used in the movie and this outdoor deck scene brilliantly embellished with strategic fans for a realistic effect. Make sure you have plenty of memory free on your phone because sweet baby cheeses are you going to take some photos. 

No, this thought about the perception of the passing of time isn’t based on a tender moment, but from when I was waiting in line for the toilet at a brunch spot on Sunday morning.

I was in the line long enough for the girl in front of me to think something along the lines of “nah, bugger this” and walk away.

And if I wasn’t so desperate, I would have done the same.

It seemed as if an age had passed while I was standing there, waiting for that “engaged” sign to switch to “vacant”. I wondered what could possibly be taking someone so long – and of course, the thought did cross my mind that if someone was taking so long in there, perhaps going right in after them was against my best interests.* But then, risking soiling myself in public was also against my best interests. So I waited.

* This is obviously a poo joke, which I’m fairly certain my father would have picked up on. I was going to build on this joke by suggesting that he could have been snorting cocaine but I ran out of room. I like to think that he wasn’t doing lines because it was like 11.50am and who the heck needs coke to get through brunch, but then it was in Sydney, after all. 

And to be honest, I probably wasn’t waiting more than five minutes.

But it seemed so much longer than that. It was then that this idea about the variable passing of time hit me: time moves slowly when your bladder is full.

It made me think about some of the other situations you’re in when one minute could not possibly be 60 seconds. We’ve all been there. We’ve all questioned whether the second hand on the clock was mocking us.

And sure, time is a damn illusion. It’s a mutually agreed upon delusion humanity follows to make things easier for ourselves. And that makes sense, because just imagine how much more frustrating catching the train would be if we all had different ways of measuring time.

But while we can always measure time by the clock, the ticker in our head can drastically  alter our perception of it. And obviously there are scenarios when you want time to stay still and occasions when you want hours to pass in the blink of an eye – like when you wake up a few minutes before your alarm goes off or you’re getting a pap smear.

I guess it comes down to not only the situation, but your attitude to it.

And to prove my point, I’ll use examples that are interchangeable.

Here are some examples of occasions when a minute flies by:

When you’re in a hot car: and you know you’re going to have to get out and brave the Toowoomba drizzle at the next stop.

During exercise: and you have a one-minute break between one set of burpees and another set of something equally as tortuous.

During an ad break: when you’re running to the toilet and you don’t want to miss a thing.

And here’s when a minute drags on:

When you’re in a hot car: usually when your mum gets stuck chatting with someone on the street

During exercise: and the workout regime calls for you to do one minute of anything more strenuous than a stretch.

During an ad break: when you’re waiting to see if the drongo in the hotted-up Commodore blew over the limit.

* I feel like I should have had a concluding sentence to round this out, but honestly, I was just too damn tired. I’m really dragging my half-decaying carcass to the finish line of this year. I’m surprised I’m even managing to wear pants when I leave the house. 

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This one made it to print

Shrine on

Originally published in The Clifton Courier, November 29

The other day I got to thinking about my funeral.

And no, this thought isn’t borne out of deep, existential reflection. It’s not even from watching Beaches. No, this thought process was fuelled by a combination of extreme self-obsession and my controlling nature.

It came about when I was thinking about my hat, of all things. A dark brown Cattleman; I feel a strong connection to it. I’m yet to write my name in it, but it’s on my to-do list after a tense few hours (and five phone calls) without it after the races.

The thought struck me that it would look great on my casket one day (hopefully a long way into the future… although I do sometimes fantasise about humanity coming together to ensure my immortality) as a symbol of the person I was and the life that I lived; an object that encapsulated my very essence.

The idea of pre-determining what summed up me as person as opposed to leaving to someone else appealed to me. Self-obsessed? Yep. Controlling? You bet.

But you don’t want to get this wrong. Because sometimes people just don’t “get” you. For years people thought one of my sisters was a total diva who loved pink and make-up and whose life goal was to become a professional glamourzon. In truth, her favourite colour is green and she’s an absolute stinker who wants to stand up to the lions of environmental injustice. What people may think would sum you up might not actually fit the bill, so you have to take control yourself.

This got me thinking about other objects that would form an accurate representation of me as a person.

And because I had very little else to do with my Sunday afternoon (my goals for the day included getting out of bed, buying groceries and making a barley risotto, if that gives you any indication as to how I spend my weekends) I decided to write a list.

So here is a non-exhaustive list of things you would need should you want to construct a personal shine to me in your own home:

A lock of my hair: Preferably bound with a tasteful white ribbon, if available. The long, thin strands of my DNA and keratin are perhaps my most iconic assets. Being brown instead of the blonde my three sisters were gifted with, my hair is arguably one of the most significant factors that influenced my identity. It was the colour of poo while my sisters had “hair of gold”. You would think it would have made me develop a shining personality to compensate for this; instead I became a sarcastic show pony.

A belt buckle in the shape of a galloping horse: I bought this from a chain store as a teenager and still wear it today thanks to the leatherwork and friendship of Mr May. It’s now my trademark. You could say it’s a nod to my wild, free spirit bolting across the horizon towards greatness… or you could simply put it down to my childish fascination with horses because they are pretty.

A bunch of carrots: Carrots consist of about 40% of my diet – I like to have something to munch on and carrots seem like the easiest, least destructive option. Aesthetically it would be nice if the shrine carrots still had the leaves attached and were tied an earthy twine bow but, realistically speaking, slapping down a plastic kilo bag of them would be more appropriate.

An extra-strong black tea bag with a jar of ironbark honey: For obvious tea-related reasons.

A recording of the sound I make walking in my thongs, played on a loop: I have a particular rhythm. It’s a unique cycle of clicks, clacks and slaps that sounds from my thongs as I obnoxiously walk from place to place. Once you know it, it can be extremely helpful in locating me in the aisles of a hardware store.

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