Originally published in the Clifton Courier, March 14, 2018

A recipe for disaster, in 34 steps.

Step 1: Plan to make the most of a drizzly afternoon by leaving work on time, having a cup of tea, maybe doing a light ab workout and doing a bit of reading before an early bedtime.

Step 2: Remember a conversation you had with someone at work about their birthday being the next day and how much they love sticky date pudding.

Step 3: Decide to attempt to appear as a caring person, forecasting a lovely rainy afternoon baking pudding. Tell yourself it will be fun, won’t take long and will fill the apartment with a delightful caramel aroma.

Step 4: Look up a recipe on Google and tell yourself “this should be easy enough”.

Step 5: Go to the fancy, pretentious grocery store near your house for baking supplies. Wander fruitlessly until finally giving in and asking the shop assistant “where would I find the dates?”

Step 6: Be grateful the shop assistant wasn’t a sassy sitcom character who took the opportunity to make a quip about your romantic prospects.

Step 7: Be outraged by how bloody exxy medjool dates are.

Step 8: Check out the price of prunes and decide to pioneer the Sticky Prune Pudding.

Step 9: Tell yourself you’re certain you’ve read something about prunes having less calories than meedjool dates.

Step 10: Decide to keep your work clothes on because being in semi-professional attire will put you in a professional frame of mind and stop you from licking bowls and tasting mixture by the tablespoon.

Step 11: Cream brown sugar, butter, vanilla and eggs together in a food processor.

Step 12: Tell yourself to live in the moment and sneak a taste of the smooth, fudgy mix you’ve created, ignoring the fact that this artery-clogging goo is just butter, sugar and raw eggs and that you sometimes have dignity.

Step 13: Marvel at the soothing novelty of sifting flour.

Step 14: Mix everything in together and then pour into a cake tin with one of those silicone bowl scrapers, silently praising the noble sprit who invented these mixture-saving miracle sticks.

Step 15: Put the pre-cake goo into the oven.

Step 16: Prepare the caramel sauce ingredients, deciding once again to live in the moment by licking the thickened cream from the tub.

Step 17: Curse yourself for who you’ve become.

Step 18: Catch a glimpse of a spark flying around the oven out of the corner of your eye.

Step 19: Open the oven to discover more sparks coming from the inner mechanisms of the oven, hastily turn that bastard off.

Step 20: Realise your kitchen and building could have burned down because of a pudding.

Step 21: Realise you have 1.5 litres of raw prune pudding mix in your custody.

Step 22: Consider turning up to work with said raw mixture in a milk bottle for the colleague’s birthday.

Step 23: Decide to cook the raw mixture like pancakes on the sandwich press.

Step 24: Continue making the caramel sauce, frequently tasting the sinful liquid.

Step 25: Try to ignore how much caramel sauce you “tasted” to “ensure quality”.

Step 26: Scoop raw pudding mixture out of cake tin, dolloping on sandwich press until it looks like it’s been cooked all the way through.

Step 27: Repeat this process for 40 minutes, complaining to your housemate the whole time.

Step 28: Realise that, with the pudding mix, the caramel sauce and the greasing of the hotplate, you’ve used half a kilo of butter in this desert.

Step 29: Calculate an estimation of how much butter you’ve personally consumed.

Step 30: Hope to the heavens the prune power kicks in soon.

Step 31: Pile the pudding pancakes on top of each other with a drizzle of caramel sauce between each layer in a bid to ensure some semblance of structural integrity.

Step 32: Name your creation a Sticky Prune Pudding Pancake Stack.

Step 33: Take a second look at your cakey abomination and realise you’ve spent three hours of your live making a caramel cow pat.

Step 34: Decide to never do something nice for anyone ever again.

Originally published in The Clifton Courier, March 7, 2018

I’m not someone who can lie easily.

A lie curdles in my stomach. Lying to me is like drinking room-temperature milk hungover on a hot day: I could do it under extreme circumstances, but I find it awfully unpleasant and avoid it at all costs.

Also, given my character was shaped by Disney movies and crime dramas, I’ve found lying to be illogical. The truth, I’ve been conditioned to believe, will always come out. So it makes sense* to be as honourable and upfront as you can in the first instance.

* That’s right, my morals are based on fear of the consequences, not virtue.

Honesty, then, is my favourite policy.

Not only is it ethical, but logistically, it just makes things easier. It means you don’t have to go to all the effort of covering your tracks and it saves you from having to mentally keep track of your fibs.

However, there is such a thing as being too honest. Being too upfront. Giving too much information.

This is dangerous and can make things extremely unpleasant conversationally. You want to tell the truth, but not everyone needs to hear the whole, hairy truth.

This is why euphemisms are so handy. They’re like special code words society has made up to say things without actually having articulate the shameful truth out loud.

You can say something like “I’m trying to save” instead of revealing quite how much of a mess your financial situation is. This magical phrase hints at what’s happening, with a comfortable fog of ambiguity clouding the truth.

And it’s a lovely way of explaining your frugal behaviour in such a way that it won’t make people deeply concerned for you.

Because no one needs to know that you’re buying your undies in bulk budget packs from the supermarket. Or that most of your fruit comes from the free fruit bowl in the staffroom. And people would start getting worried about you if you told them the only source of red meat you’ve had in the past two weeks was the table at a party you weren’t invited to but somehow ended up at. Generally, most people wouldn’t be impressed to hear that you ate three pieces of lamb and a cold sausage that had been presumably sitting out for hours at a stranger’s house. That takes you from “money conscious” to “scummy human ibis” preeeetty quickly.

Then there’s the polite terms for physical ailments.

I like how “upset stomach” can substitute for the graphic details that societal norms prevent you from explicitly revealing.

This blanket term means you don’t need to get down to particulars. It’s not necessary to give a lengthy description of what went down. There’s no need to even specify from which orifice you’ve exploded from. You can leave that information out. It becomes up to the listener’s imagination to fill in the details, if that’s what they want to do. They have the option to think no further about the unpleasantness that occurred. They get the message that you are unwell without any of the grossness.

And using the term “upset stomach” means people usually get the message not to pry for extra details, which is a good thing because if they don’t ask follow up questions you won’t have to tell them, for example, that you came within 30 seconds of pooing your pants at the supermarket and completely redecorating the floor of the bakery aisle.

Then there’s “I was a bit tipsy”, which is a broad way of saying “I made everyone make a toast to ginger ale and was yelling the lyrics to Disney songs”.

I also like throwing a cheeky “I’m a bit seedy” out there instead of saying “I may vomit at any time and can’t support my own head right now”.

And these are all great. But, as you’ve probably realised, I perhaps don’t use them enough. The only euphemism I frequently employ is when I refer to myself a “a columnist”, which we all know means “I overshare the graphic and depressing details of my life with people who really don’t need to hear another one of my vomit stories”.

Originally published in The Clifton Courier, February 28, 2018

Everyone has something they just can’t stand.

But I’m not talking big picture stuff like gender discrimination or neglectful environmental management. That stuff goes without saying.

I’m talking about small, seemingly trivial stuff that, for whatever reason, we have adverse reactions to.

For example, I have a friend who hates bananas. Hates them. It’s not like they’ve done anything to her – she’s never been personally victimised by a yellow, curved fruit or anything. She just can’t stand them. She won’t have anything to do with any food that contains banana as an ingredient. And it’s not just the taste; she can’t even stand the thought of touching their skins.

It’s not a phobia of bananas though; there’s no fear, just a deep, unexplainable dislike.

And we all have things like that.  There are certain things that, for some illogical reason, make us sick to our stomachs. Things we find so repulsive we can’t help but have a physical reaction to. Personally, I have a few. I hate it when people drag things along carpet. I hate the feel of dry shampoo on my fingers. I hate looking at my bank account (just another “I’m a twenty-something-mess” quip for you, to stay on brand).

But perhaps my biggest one is something so completely trivial that it perfectly epitomises the notion of First World Problems: broken escalators.

They’re the worst.

And as self-promoting as this sounds, my distain for the unmoving escalator isn’t rooted in laziness. I’m usually that person who walks up escalators. Not so much because I have somewhere important to be (to have somewhere important to be, you have to be important to begin with, and I’m in no danger of that), but because I just hate waiting there. I also like the idea that by taking extra steps, I’m shaping and firming my glutes. And if you’ve ever seen a Maguire from behind, you’ll know we need all the glute shaping we can get.

The truth is that I get motion sickness from stationary escalators. Yes, I’m aware of how that sounds. But it’s true.

I guess you could call it motion-less sickness.

Even though I can see the escalators aren’t moving, my brain expects them to be. And so my brain prepares me, someone who knows full well that those stairs aren’t moving, for motion.

What results is an extremely visible brain malfunction.

I involuntarily lift my foot up much higher than a usual step would require and step on to the static stairs like I’m dipping a toe into water I’m not sure the temperature of. It looks like I’ve forgotten how my legs work.

As this happens, I noticeably dry-retch and do this weird, breathy vomity burp thing. Sometimes I even make a gasping noise, like I’m trying to breathe through my mouth with a gob full of dry Weet-Bix. I don’t really know how to describe this impulse in another other way than the way you’d respond if someone suggested your grandmother was still sexually active (but good on her, I say – you’re never too old for love).

I try to pull myself together to walk down the stairs, but grip on to the rail for dear life, trying not to look down.

As I walk away, I’m shaky, clammy-handed and, while not proven by a medical-grade thermometer, my core temp has risen by a good 10 degrees.

I can’t explain this behaviour. I can’t say exactly why escalators affect me so much. And I don’t know what this means about my overall state of mind.

I don’t have any answers to neatly wrap up this column.

So, instead, I’ll just say this: to all the escalator tradies out there, please know that your work is very noble indeed. You have my eternal gratitude. And the next time I toast, I’ll raise my glass to you.

Originally Published in The Clifton Courier, February 21, 2018

So something just happened at the gym just now.

Yep, there I go, just casually dropping into conversation that I have been to the gym. Let the record show that I am somewhat active and therefore an upstanding human being!

I was doing one of those classes where you need a bench, which is a plastic platform you prop these motivationally-coloured plastic rings underneath to give said platform height. You usually need two of these rings for each end of the platform – one is too weak, while three says you’re trying too hard and no one wants to be that person at the gym.

It was already quite a full class and by the time I rocked up there were only two platforms left. It was a crowded room. My dad would probably describe it as “every man and his dog was there”, but given it was an exercise class in the eastern suburbs of Sydney, I would say “every woman and their pug” would be more appropriate.

And it’s dog eat dog in there of a Saturday morning. Resources and space are scarce.

So I had to be protective of what I’d claimed as mine.

I had stepped over the two platforms to grab the height rings behind them – I was sort of straddling them but also hovering above, almost as if I was weeing in a really, really dodgy public toilet. As I was grabbing these rings, a lady came and grabbed both platforms from between my legs.

Now this became a little awkward, because I thought I had clearly reserved one of those platforms by both my being there first and the way I was hovering over it.

Despite the fact that I’m typically quite a loud person and like to get around in a signature hat, I’m not generally the most assertive person – particularly with strangers.

I’ll usually apologise if someone steps in my path and will let people order in front of me. The other day I was at a party where the food was scarce and I was starving, but when another girl and I went for the same single serve of chips – the last one on the table – I insisted she take them.

I’m not sure what is behind this. You could argue it’s because I’m a “nice” person. But maybe it’s more than that. Maybe it’s fuelled not by chip-based philanthropy, but by a deep-seated desire to seem “nice”. Maybe it denotes a lack of self-esteem. Perhaps it’s a symptom of my patriarchal upbringing.

Whatever it is, I seem to have an innate desire to recoil and apologise.

So I was surprised when something inside made me say words to the effect “excuse me sweetie, one of those was mine”. Obviously I wasn’t that sassy and it probably tumbled out in a timid mumble, but my utterance was of assertion.

And I walked away with my gym equipment.

But then this made me think – or, depending on how you look at it, over think – about what this said about me as a person.

Was I suddenly a strong, fierce woman who knows her worth and is not afraid to claim what is rightfully hers? Had I become a woman who’s not gonna to take no… Sugar Honey Ice and Tea (this is a family paper, after all) no more?

Or was I looking at this the wrong way? I began to think about the other side of the coin, and question whether I was as in the right. Had I gone from assertive to ruthlessly selfish? And did this mean I was the kind of person you see in disaster movies desperately and mercilessly kicking people out of the way to claim a spot on the space ship/boat/back of a truck taking people to safety? This, of course, made me question whether I deserved to continue the human race in a post-apocalyptic world – who the hell did I think I was?!

Yep, that was the thought I got to after a simple misunderstanding. A slight inconvenience leads to me questioning who I am. That’s what I’m dealing with in the old think box.

In case you’re wondering, I continued the class with my head held high, told myself I was right to stand up for myself and used that bench to strengthen my thighs. Because if it does come down to me needing to boot people off emergency transport to save myself, I’m going to need one heck of a roundhouse kick.