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.

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.