Originally published in The Clifton Courier, January 24, 2018

It’s important to have respect for yourself.

Sooner or later, we all reach a point where we have to stand up for ourselves and say, “yeah nah, I’m not takin’ that”. There comes a time when we know we are above whatever crap is going down and strut away – preferably with a powerful song playing in the background*.

* Maybe something like Leah Haywood’s Taking Back What’s Mine or Destiny Child’s Survivor or even Britney Spears’ I’m Not A Girl, Not Yet A Woman? It really depends on the situation, I guess. 

As someone who publically recounts instances when I’ve covered myself in vomit and still asks for “your cheapest beer” at bars, you wouldn’t think that I have that much respect for myself. But it turns out that I do have a sprinkling of dignity – even if it may be a quantity small enough to fit into those tiny ornamental pockets they put in women’s jeans. *

* I  will never forgive the patriarchy for this grave injustice. Neither should you. Feel the rage. Be the change. Start a damn running shorts company with decent-sized fucking pockets. You can even call it “run the world” if you want. Im sure Beyonce would be on board. 

I was reminded of this fact only very recently.

It was nearly midnight on New Year’s Eve and I had come “home” (and I put “home” in quotation marks because I feel a place where you can’t buy a tin of XXXX Bitter* and get change back from a fiver doesn’t deserve the title of “home”) to quite a dismal situation in my Sydney flat. I still didn’t have a wardrobe. My “dresser” was a series of washing baskets and an open suitcase under my bed. A vague dank scent lingered in the carpet, as if a sprinkler spitting liquid sadness had been left on while I was away.

* You can’t even buy bitters here. It’s a disgrace. 

It was bad enough that I would have to readjust to Daylight Savings, but my living quarters made my return almost unbearable.

Because I haven’t even got to the worst part: the bathroom.

I’m lucky to have my own bathroom. This flat was in such a dodgy way when I moved in (at one point a plant sprouted through a gap in the peeling lino on the kitchen floor, no doubt nourished by the leaking roof above it) that I could afford a room with an “en suite”. And just like “home” had quote marks, so too does “en suite”, because it is too fance of a term to describe the “closet with a sink” that I call my bathroom.

I mean, I love having complete control over my toileting facilities, because it means I can be as grubby as I can handle without worrying about someone else having to live in my filth. As someone who sheds hair as much as me, this is important. I mean, I think this is a positive thing – should I be kidnapped, I’ll leave a trail of DNA to lead the intuitive detective who just gets the just the right amount of emotionally-involved in my disappearance right to me. But some people take a negative view of my shedding. Weirdly, some people actually don’t enjoy finding long, dark mystery hairs on their personal items.

Anyway, because the bathroom was my filth cave and my filth cave alone, it had been neglected in the lead up to the holidays. And the situation intensified over the break. The worst part was the toilet seat.

Now. I ask you to please keep in mind that this flat is a little on the crappy side and old enough to have great grandchildren. I’ll also assert that I am usually a clean and tidy person*. I wash my sheets weekly. I wipe down benches. I never leave crumbs in the sink. Please, please, please keep that in mind.

* I don’t think we need to take my sports bra washing schedule into account. Most females would agree that it’s normal practice. 

Because when I returned from holidays the weird splodges on the toilet seat had revealed themselves to be a full-blown mould situation.

Yeah. Mould.

And after driving for more than 10 hours from Clifton to Sydney, I just couldn’t handle that. I valued myself too much to use it. I respected myself too much to spend the first hours of the 2018 scrubbing mould off a piece of yellowed, flaky plastic that countless unknown butts had come into contact with.

Maybe this makes me a diva, but I don’t care.

So the next day I treated myself to a new toilet seat.

And while it’s somewhat depressing that I used the phrase “treat yourself” when buying a toilet seat, it was damn exhilarating to do so.

I had taken back control. I was powerful. And as I tossed that mouldy old seat into the garbage bin, I told myself that I was too good for that.

So, that’s how I set the tone for the year: asserting to myself that I was better than a mouldy toilet seat. That’s close enough to self-respect, isn’t it?

Originally published in The Clifton Courier, January 17, 2018

The truth isn’t always black and white – especially when you’re talking about eating habits.

Around the beginning of the year, we tend to get reflective of the 12 months that went by. We get year in review news stories, we look back at photos and we asses our achievements and failures. But weirdly, I was given the chance to review my grocery habits this year.

I’m a holder of a supermarket loyalty card, and this particular grocery powerhouse decided to celebrate 2018 by giving me a round-up of my points activity for 2017. Riveting, hey?

But then I noticed an item way down the bottom of the email I almost deleted instinctively without reading.  It was a summary of my most-bought items of 2017.

This was interesting. Because yes, I was obviously extremely curious to know just what I’d been trading my money for. But then, there was reason to feel anxious about this heading.

Because personal data can be telling, more telling than we’d otherwise admit to ourselves. We may say that we don’t care how many of the Kardashian sisters are brewing up another batch of Kardashian goodness in their maternal ovens, our online data may tell a whole other story. Because no matter how many rats you couldn’t give about the famed family, you may still click on a bunch of different links to stories teasing out details about them*. Just like Shakira’s hips, the data doesn’t lie.

* Dammnit Kris, just give us the answer! 

Sometimes those kinds of confronting statistics are best left alone (and by “alone”, I of course mean “for the analysts at social media platforms to package and sell to advertisers to target specific commercial messages to you”).

Was I ready to know this kind of detail about myself?

Did I really want to know how many bags of ridiculously expensive brown rice chips I’d bought in a bid to make myself feel healthier while I binged on guacamole*? Would it be helpful knowing how many loaves of bread I’d inhaled? And what if my most-bought item revealed something dark about me that I wasn’t aware of – like if I’d had a weird sponge-eating habit that I’d hidden from myself*, only to be confronted by the cold, hard commercially-collected data confirming that I’d bought 652 sponges last year? What then?!

* Incidentally, this is my dinner plan for the night. Because if I have to pay for my own dentist visits and remember to take my contraceptive pill regularly, you better believe I’m taking advantage of the I-make-my-own-damn-decisions-about-dinner aspect of adulthood. 

As it turns out, my most bought items were much blander than I’d expected.

In fact, there’s nothing remotely sinister about them. It wasn’t a suspicious amount of matches or box after box of chockie bickies. It was actually kind of boring.

And upon analysing my top four as a whole, I come off as a bit of a wanky health nut.

I purchased a box of frozen spinach 47 times. I’ve also purchased a box of frozen, chopped kale 47 times. Each box is 250 grams apiece, meaning that within the year of 2017, I bought 23.5 kilos of frozen greens. That’s roughly the equivalent of a six-year-old kid.*

* Yes, I looked this up. I also look up collective nouns a lot too. Collective nouns are fabulous, mild fun. The perfect way to amuse yourself over a cup of tea.

I also bought a quantity of sweet potato 46 times. Unfortunately they didn’t provide me the total weight, but given how much I do like to pack away the potato’s orange cousin, I reckon we’d be talking Year 12 DD-level* prop in terms of weight.

* I say Darling Downs because he wasn’t able to progress to state because he’s a little chunkier than the boys from Brissie.

The fourth most-bought item was strawberries. I bought at least 41 punnets, according to the email – even though I suspect that number to be higher given how frequently the supermarkets flogged strawbs in two-for deals*.

* They get me every bloody time. Two-for deals tap into something primal inside me and I just can’t override my natural instinct to bag a bargain. 

My data suggests I’m a healthy eater. You might even look at those figures and assume I’m some kind of fitness freak who follows strict diet plans and lives on smoothies.

But it was interesting to be presented with this insight into my grocery habits on a day when my official step count was 307 – for your information, it’s often recommended that people aim for 10,000. I also finished off a six-layer rainbow cream cake – roughly half of which I’d eaten on my own. And I’d actually sipped on a half-empty bottle of $7-dollar watermelon-flavoured wine to see if it was worth keeping after being open in the fridge for a week (unfortunately, it wasn’t).*

So while the data may not necessarily lie, it seems that – in this case – it doesn’t always tell the entire truth.

Originally published in The Clifton Courier, January 10, 2018

It’s always hard when the Christmas holidays coms to an end.

There are so many dark realisations you’re slapped in the face with once the New Year rocks around.

You’ve eaten so much you can’t imagine you’ll ever feel attractive again (unless, of course, your definition of attractive is resembling a sweaty potato with arms and legs, in which case you’ll feel like the sexiest thing that can’t breathe comfortably in pants). You spent all your money on scented candles for other people, so you have to survive on baked beans and leftover fruitcake. You have to start wearing shoes again. You can’t take afternoon naps anymore. You have to return to whatever galley you sweat your days away in to fulfil to the spirit-breaking responsibilities our capitalist society demands of us.

It’s hard not to get sucked down into a sinkhole of dread.

But to pull myself out of this pit of misery, I like to do what I always do when I need to justify the foolish, frivolous actions: pretend I learned something from the experience.

Not only does this make whatever ridiculous things I did with my time off more palatable, but it also allows me to present the rest of this column to you in list-form. You see, I made the foolish mistake of getting back to being a productive member of society (and yes, I do use the phrase “productive member of society” loosely) until the last minute and can’t really form proper paragraphs at the moment. So putting things in dot points really appeals to me.

Sure, the below list doesn’t change the fact that I have to be a functional member of society again, but at least it makes me feel as if I gained something from my time off.

So please, enjoy this list of things I learned on the holidays, and try to find some scrap of wisdom:

There are certain surfaces you shouldn’t walk on in thongs: as someone who likes to flaunt their true blue, ridgey didge Aussie ways over their city-slicking comrades, I fancy myself as the type of girl who can do anything in a pair of thongs. Sure, it’s an odd manifestation of nationalism, but I like to think that I could jog, dance and even outrun a cranky kangaroo in a pair of thongs. I viewed it as some noble ability, as if competently wearing stereotypical Australian footwear makes me some kind of ‘Strayan princess – which of course this feeds right into my misguided sense of self-worth. But as it turns out, creek beds and thongs don’t mix – you either get it stuck in the thick sludge that is muddy black soil or you slide right down a dry bank and end up with a gravel rash that makes it look like you got roller blades for Christmas.

There’s nothing professional about rocking up to work with a scab all up your leg that is flaking off like old paint on a weathered fence post: See the above point for reference. And this really doesn’t help in giving off a professional vibe if you’re already someone who’ll wear last night’s bed socks to work and try to make “corporate pony t-shirt” an office look.

Passion Pop does a watermelon flavour now: the nectar of my youth may set you back a steep $7 a pop (yeah, I meant to make that pun) but at least there’s now some variety. Along of the plain, carbonated regret flavour I grew up with, I was pleasantly surprised to be able to enjoy that same average taste with a hint of fruit.

You don’t have to be fancy to appreciate a good wine: See the above point for reference.

You can double-batter a chip: if you’re eating fish and chips and the batter comes loose, don’t just waste it – you can stuff the hollow cone of deep fried carbs with deep fried potatoes. It’s like eating chips, only with more salt, more oil and a complete lack of self-respect. I recommend it with chicken salt.

Dieting just isn’t going to happen to this year: See the above point for reference.

Originally published in The Clifton Courier, December 20, 2017

* Obviously, this was written just before Christmas. It was a time when I was absolutely knackered, dragging my half-decaying carcass along the ground to the finish line, leaving a trail of gloopy misery and dignity as I edged towards the end of the year. Perhaps you’ll be able to pick up on that. 

I think I have a problem.

I know what you’re thinking: “well that’s been obvious from the outset, Dannielle – the whole town is quite aware that you’re an absolute mess and this column is doing nothing to help the situation”.  Yes, it’s well documented that I have a whole range of problems. There’s my issue with the ironic over-popularisation of nuggets, financial decision-making, that whole overthinking thing I do, committing to not vomiting and, actually, any kind of commitment at all*.

* I had plenty more, but I felt that five problems was enough for a short column in an otherwise cheery pre-Christmas paper.

But now it seems I have another one to add to the already lengthy list.

I have a new kind of problem and, just like this column, it’s conveniently Christmas-related.

This problem is about my emotional attachment to a ham.

No, this isn’t going to be a heart-warming message of peace and goodwill as a way to cap off the year; it’s 600 words about ham. Sorry, but if you want something deep and meaningful from me, I’m going to need a bottle of Jameson and some ginger ale*.

* I have to admit, this line was largely me fishing for free drinks. It did not achieve the desired result, so I’m going to have to really lay it on thick before the Clifton Show rocks around. I mean, the XXXX bitters go pretty cheap anyway, but a free drink’s a free drink. And, in all honestly, I actually prefer to go with a rounds-based system when I’m out. But it would be nice to snag a free coldie as proof that someone reads my damn dribble.  

I was given a Christmas ham and it was perhaps one of the best things that has ever happened to me.

This statement is a concern. I mean, the fact that I now have sole custody over a large hunk of dead pig is a positive thing. I have a tote bag (I bought it from Cobb and Co and it says “totes”) that is full of meat. If I’m hungry, all I have to do is grab a knife and slice off a hunk of pork.

Yes, this is fortunate. But should it be the best part of my year? Should “this ham is one of the best things that has ever happened to me” be a sentence I can truthfully write? I don’t need to see a psychologist to know that this isn’t a good sign. Heck, even an internet-certified life coach would red flag this.

Secondly, I’m becoming worryingly over-protective of the ham. I’m not yet at the stage of sleeping next to the fridge with a dagger in my hand, but I wouldn’t put it past me.

I was telling a friend how I planned on “not sharing it with any bastard”. Pretty sure he thought I was joking. Then I started asking about how best to deter my people from sneakily hacking at my personal ham.

I began to practice my warning, starting off with “look guys, it’s Christmas time…” My friend expected me to finish the sentence with someone along the lines of “…so in the spirit of the season, let’s all share this delicious ham”. But that’s not what came out of my mouth.

Instead, I thought of words to the effect of: “…we’re all poor as heck from buying presents and we can’t afford groceries so that ham is my main source of protein* – now keep ya grubby mitts off it”. Not exactly the most benevolent of sentiments.

* Not a joke. Meat is spency. I only hope that I have loaded up on enough iron while I was home to get me through to the next pay day. 

This is tied in with my third ham-related problem: I have an overwhelming desire to the whole thing all by myself. I am flying home for Christmas, so it has to be gone by Friday. I mean, I could demolish a “giant” schnitzel just as fast my smug former colleague who apparently can to eat lots because he plays sports (I even ate the leftover chips off my other co-worker’s plates to really show him up) but that’s a lot of pork for one person to eat in five days. I’d literally be sweating brine; I may even require hospitalisation.

But still I want to finish it off on my own.

I don’t know what’s the most worrying motivation behind this: greed, stinginess or the personal validation I would get from telling people I ate a whole leg of ham. Neither option is good.

What started out as a magnificent gift has become a burden. I have the weight of a metaphorical leg of ham on my chest.

So as I come to my already over-stretched word limit, I’ve yet to come up with a solution. I’m usually able to pull some kind of conclusion out of somewhere by this point in the column, but I’ve got nothing. It’s the end of the year. I’m tired. I need a break.

And so the only thing that’s coming to mind now is for me to try to sneak a leg of ham on the plane as carry on luggage*. If you don’t see me at Christmas Eve mass, it’s because I’ve been detained. Merry Christmas, everyone!

* I decided against smuggling the ham under my clothes as a fake pregnancy belly and left it in the fridge. In the end, I became so sick of the ham that even contemplating it now is a thought that curdles in my stomach like hot sushi and room-temperature milk. I left a note pleading for my housemate to take the ham, but when I returned to this stinktown I opened the fridge to discover my salty nemesis waiting for me, mocking me from within its calico cloak. Its skin had hardened and withered, with the contrast between the once succulent hunk of meat I’d left behind and its current form reminiscent of the before and after mugshots government bodies use to scare people from trying methylamphetamines. 

The allure was gone. The curse broken. I knew that I had to finally rid myself of that briney demon forever. I could no longer allow it to haunt my fridge or my mind.

I threw it in the bin.